The legendary actor makes his return after eight years away from the screen.
This is perhaps a little overzealous to say, but I never believe it when an artist says that they are retiring. If a true talent exists, I don’t think that the artistic impulse can simply be flicked off like a switch; real passion cannot be killed, and the urge to create cannot be permanently ignored. Case in point: I was never convinced that Daniel Day-Lewis’ final performance was going to be in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2017 film Phantom Thread, and with the creation and arrival of Anemone, I am thrilled to be proven correct, as the legendary actor has not lost an ounce of his dramatic skill and gravitas in the last eight years, and his turn in the film is simply phenomenal.
A story about fathers and sons fittingly co-written by the three-time Oscar winner and his son, first-time director Ronan Day-Lewis, the film is an onion: it presents as being very simple, but the progression of the story peels back layers and unveils something potent below. You can count all of the characters on one hand, and it volleys back and forth between just two principal locations, but it’s lean, raw, and powerful, and the script demands exceptional the performances that it gets from not just Day-Lewis but also Sean Bean, Samuel Bottomley, and Samantha Morton.
Anemone’s subject is the Stoker family – a fractured clan with a complicated history. Jem Stoker (Sean Bean) is married to Nessa (Samantha Morton) and together they have raised their teenage son Brian (Samuel Bottomley), but Brian is the biological child of Jem’s brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), who abandoned Nessa when she was pregnant to live a life of solitude in the wilderness. There is no communication between Ray and the family for years, but circumstances change when Brian is involved in an altercation that sees him nearly beat another boy to death and is on the verge of being declared AWOL from the military.
While the teen stays at home at grapples with what he has done, Jem decides that it is finally time to reunite with his brother, and he travels out to Ray’s home in the wild to see if he can’t get him to meet his son. Disturbed from a lifetime full of experienced horrors and irrepressibly obstinate, Ray furiously rejects the opportunity, but over the course of days spent together, Jem gets him to open up about the terrible secret that drove him away from the world after his time in service during The Troubles.
On one side of Anemone, there is the simple-yet-immensely-complicated question of “Why did Ray abandon his family?” and it deals blow after emotional blow as it paints a portrait of an extremely complicated and broken man, with Jem growing to understand who his sibling has become. Ray is a bona fide sonofabitch, with a temper foul enough that you expect him to eventually start spitting acid – but he is captivating, and his brother’s persistence reminds that there is a human in there made of more than just trauma and rage.
The other half of the film is the examination of the power of a father in a son’s world – whether he is actually a part of it or not. We only get a snapshot of Brian’s life, but we understand him as a young man who not only is plagued by the mystery of not knowing his father, but also clearly has inherited some of his traits (the standout being his anger).
It’s an immensely heavy cinematic experience to be sure, but part of what’s fascinating about the work is how it manages to not drown you in misery. This is in part a tribute to the tonal complexity of the film’s script – a perfect example of this being a disgusting tale of scatological revenge that Ray tells… about getting back at an elderly priest who sexually abused him as a child. (You truly do not know whether to laugh or cry.) Another part of this is the film’s remarkable beauty, as Jem and Ray spend their days ensconced in stunning forests and running along expansive beaches. And then there is the tremendous cast doing tremendous work.
The intimacy of the work demands actors who melt into their roles, and the stars prove up to the challenging task. It will surprise nobody to learn that Daniel Day-Lewis is the showstopper, in the grand scheme injecting his character with pathos as powerful as his spite, but Sean Bean is a powerful pilot for the emotional journey, not only drawing out Ray’s truth emotionally but confronting him physically.
Samuel Bottomley and Samantha Morton are brilliant in their own right on the other side of the plot. The former effuses a lifetime of confusion and pain in his eyes and hung shoulders, long tortured by both his father’s absence and left behind reputation, while the latter offers a potent blend of love and fear, wanting what is best for her son but having many questions of her own about why Ray left.
Anemone is worth seeing for the return of Daniel Day-Lewis alone, as he is a singular artists and one of the most gifted men to ever perform in front of a camera. But the bonus is that he and his son also happen to make tremendous collaborators and have together made a movie that is deep, challenging, beautiful, dark and ultimately optimistic.
