In the movie world, it can be intimidating for a child to direct their parent. John Huston did it for his father Walter on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Fifty years later, Fraser Clarke Heston did the same for his dad Charlton in Alaska. Some got fairly comfortable with the arrangement: Emilio Estevez directed his father Martin Sheen three times and Nick Cassavetes directed his mother Gena Rowlands four. But it must be particularly daunting -and especially for a first-time director- when their father is widely regarded as one of the greatest actors in the world, with a record number of Oscar wins and a performance style notorious for its intensity.
Yet that was the challenge that Ronan Day-Lewis set for himself in directing his father, Daniel Day-Lewis, in the latter's first movie in eight years, having previously insisted on his retirement from acting. In fairness, no matter their reputation, nobody knows an actor better than their own family, and in the case of Anemone, Ronan and Daniel in fact wrote the film together -the first writing credit for the elder Day-Lewis. And so the film could be seen as a reflection of both mens' sensibilities, undeterred perhaps from the prospect of working together. Still though, Daniel commands a certain power and prestige that Ronan is perhaps not quite able to match in his set of responsibilities.
Against an eerie, quasi-fantastical context, Anemone is about the Stoker family of northern England and the consequences of one man’s trauma. Day-Lewis’s Ray was a soldier in Ireland during the Troubles, violently combating the IRA until some nebulous incident resulted in him being guilty of a war crime -and he has since spent some twenty years living off grid and self-sufficiently in the dense woods north of the Scottish border. Now in the aftermath of his father dying, his brother Jem (Sean Bean), who has married his former girlfriend Nessa (Samantha Morton) seeks him out to bring him home to reunite him with his troubled son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) who has seemingly inherited his father’s violent tendencies.
Much of this information comes to us very slowly, it’s not until a third of the way in that we get any real sense of why Ray lives like this or even Jem’s reasons for coming to see him. Dialogue is sparse through patches of the movie, as the director Day-Lewis lets the tension simmer and emphasizes more greatly the film’s foreboding mood. It is not a horror film, though it often feels that way, either through the intensity of Day-Lewis's performance, which recalls in certain parameters his roles in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood, or the omnipresent atmosphere of dread through both the brothers' reunion and the mother and son's drama back home. The techniques employed are often effectively haunting; it's worth remembering that for having Daniel Day-Lewis as a father, Ronan's mother is accomplished director Rebecca Miller -and he has clearly learned from her. There are some striking, creative visual ideas here -one shot that tracks back from Ray's house at night illuminating a transparent wall as he and Jem drunkenly dance, or a terrifying thunder storm brewing above cascading waves that Ray stands in -to say nothing of the following scene that does feature an otherworldly creature. This film embarks into regions of distorted reality for the sake of symbolism, and it is all very interesting and absorbing; and yet it doesn't quite fit the actual story being told.
For as skilled and as fascinating a director as he is, Ronan does feel a bit like a novice here -with these expansive visual ideas feeling a touch out of place for the highly personal drama that is the real heart of the story. The choice of tone certainly feels off, much as it is meant to disorient. The conflict and trauma that Ray is dealing with is interesting enough on its own, and Ronan's efforts to impress (though modestly successful) often distract from that. While there is certainly symbolic connective tissue between the story and the broad visuals, illustrating the consequence of Ray not being involved in his son’s life via a violent hailstorm with pellets the size of baseballs seems a tad hyperbolic. The constant teasing of violent confrontation between Ray and Jem is similarly so.
The secondary plot involving Brian, and Nessa to a lesser extent, never fully achieves the gravity it is aiming at. Day-Lewis made the choice not to show the schoolyard scuffle that has instigated all this concern -perhaps if we had we’d have a better sense of the stakes for Brian. But in simple allusion it doesn’t amount to much, and though Bottomley handles well some of the material -in particular Brian’s resentment towards his father while still being desperately curious about what happened to him- his violent tendencies only come across as generic teenage moodiness. Certainly it’s nothing that would require his biological father in his life again -he states a couple times he views Jem as his real dad anyway, and there isn’t anything to suggest that isn’t an earnest sentiment. It is a narrative point that Day-Lewis is trying to force, and yet he isn’t prepared to actually grapple with it by his choice of ending. A more rounded movie probably would have gone there.
But Day-Lewis knows the attention is on his father, and gears the movie consciously towards him -which isn’t exactly the wrong thing to do. Morton is good, and Sean Bean really does well at holding his own against the elder Day-Lewis in what is covertly his biggest movie showcase in a while. But it is Day-Lewis who grabs you most thoroughly. Any issues in the movie fade away in the light of his immensely intense and captivating performance of a gruff old soldier weathering out decades of resentment and trauma. Probably his two defining points of the film are a pair of incredibly long monologues where the camera very rarely strays from him and his delivery covers a gamut of emotions and nuances. One is quite graphic and incredibly troubling in what it communicates, the other is a long-form history and catharsis, but through both Day-Lewis exemplifies to those who may have forgotten just why he is held in such high esteem as an actor. He vividly creates this character in his look and gait as well, Ray Stoker leaping off the screen as strongly as Daniel Plainview, Newland Archer, or Abraham Lincoln. Frankly a mesmerizing character and performance that far outpaces the movie he belongs to.
And it is that performance that you come away from Anemone with, standing above the film but also lifting it up a tad. But the younger Day-Lewis’s direction is not without merit, especially on matters of tone and vivid imagery -it just isn’t focused the right way, not wholly compatible with the story being told, and overzealous in its efforts at emotional cohesion. There is some curious symbolism though, outside of the supernatural allusions -such as the titular flower- that speak to an intelligent filmmaker who I’ll be curious to see resurface. His father’s resurfacing is what really matters here, and what makes the movie worth considering.
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