Screening at NYFF: Ronan Day-Lewis’s ‘Anemone’

Ronan Day-Lewis will likely make a great movie someday, if the visual flourishes of his debut are anything to go by. Starring and co-written by Ronan’s father, the now un-retired screen legend Daniel Day-Lewis, Anemone is a moody and occasionally inviting drama set largely in a woodland cottage. It’s filled with powerful ideas about the many ways that violence—of the body, of the state and of the soul—manifests in men, and the generational ripple effects therein, even if it doesn’t cohere enough to be consistently engaging.

Then again, when people familiar with Daniel Day-Lewis’ repertoire learn of his return—Anemone is his first film since Phantom Thread in 2017—the only question on their minds will be whether or not his performance is worthwhile. That’s like asking if the sky is blue, or if the sun will rise tomorrow. Few actors have, throughout their careers, proved so consistently explosive and emotionally volatile despite the inconsistency of picking projects (it’s only the actor’s seventh film since 1997). Despite the movie proving arduous at times, Anemone stands as one of the most vulnerable performances in an already shockingly accomplished body of work, upon which—intentionally or otherwise—the film loops back and gestures toward.

Daniel plays former British soldier Ray Stoker, a man once deployed to Northern Ireland during the Troubles who now lives in total isolation in a woodland cabin. We first glimpse Ray as a shape, a silhouette—an idea of a lonely man, laboriously chopping firewood at a distance from the camera. Before we ever see his face, a legend forms around him, usually without the need for dialogue. Elsewhere, in a quaint English village, his brother Jem (Sean Bean) prepares to track him down after decades, given a troubling family development only Ray can solve.

The film’s meta-textual approach to Daniel’s return, as a hermit gone for far too long, draws on the actor’s reclusive nature to build anticipation (he once took a five-year break from movies and became a cobbler). There’s a sense of militaristic urgency to Jem’s search, between numerical coordinates scribbled on a guarded slip of paper, the slick bike on which Jem makes his way into the wilderness, and the haunting electric guitar strings scoring the whole affair, reminiscent of The Pixies. Jem is a man on a mission and, like Ronan, his goal is to bring a revered and mysterious figure back to the world.

Cinematographer Ben Fordesman creates a foreboding atmosphere. Only slivers of the story take place far outside Ray’s lonely cottage: Jem’s wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and his troubled and violent teenage son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) share a history with Ray that quickly comes to light, though their connection is the only dramatic detail that’s clarified up front. For the most part, Anemone remains tethered to the uneasy reunion between Ray and Jem, estranged siblings and grizzled veterans of war who barely say a word for the initial half hour.

The gradual discovery of what troubles them, and the painful details of Ray’s past, come to light slowly but steadily in the form of dueling tragedies whose spiritual connection the film leaves up to our intuition. The deliberate pacing smartly reflects the siblings’ uneasy stoicism, a masculine façade that prevents them from immediately opening up to one another but whose cracks are visible at a distance. Then, all of a sudden, the other shoe—and even more shoes that weren’t hinted at—begin to drop as Stoker monologues about the roots of his resentment and his macabre reasons for his self-exile. Although Anemone only creates brief spurts of momentum, they’re the kind that prove enrapturing, thanks to Daniel reaching into the depths of Ray’s long-buried pain before embarking on various tirades.

Unfortunately, there are lengthy stretches between these monologues, during which Anemone might put you to sleep. But as soon as the film returns to performance-showcase mode, it’s hard not to be enraptured by the entire cast. Bean wears the weight of the world on his shoulders, harboring decades of regret in his weary eyes. And despite the mother-son drama elsewhere feeling perfunctory—it often exists to repeat and reinforce what we can already glean from the brothers’ reunion—Morton and Bottomley make for a remarkable pair who similarly dig deep into decades of festering discontent, trying desperately to find the words.

But Daniel is, expectedly, the main event, creating a character so weathered, so gravelly-voiced and lived-in that even when the movie’s revelations aren’t remotely set up beforehand, his shattering emotional honesty proves utterly convincing and turns the story into one of cyclical violence across generations and about the suffocating constraints of Ray’s religious upbringing. The character’s viciousness is underscored by a deep-seated shame—the kind that appears through bursts of anguish, peeking from beneath his hardened façade. It is, to no one’s surprise, a performance for the ages, and it feels in dialogue with some of the actor’s greatest roles.

Alternating between a desperate sadism reminiscent of the ruthless oil tycoon Daniel Plainview (There Will Be Blood) and the quiet guilt and self-loathing of incestuous single father Jack Slavin (The Ballad of Jack and Rose, directed by Rebecca Miller, Ronan’s mother and Daniel’s wife), Anemone calls back to some of the highlights of the great thespian’s career, especially those that Ronan might’ve grown up watching or at the very least having heard about. These may have even been roles that took his father away for lengthy periods during his upbringing (physically and emotionally; Daniel is famous for transforming in his personal life according to each part), resulting in the screen being filled by a deep longing for the absent father figure, Ray.

The entire conception of Anemone feels rooted in these two works from the mid-2000s, between Plainview’s pulsing bonfire chats and beachside frolic with his brother, and Slavin’s isolation on a hippie commune (not to mention both characters’ twisted family ties). The result of building on these familiar images is a performance with raw and devastating power, at its most effective when Ronan’s camera isn’t actually doing anything beyond capturing close-ups with complete stillness. With a cast of this caliber, that’s all you really need to do.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be the young filmmaker’s preferred lingua franca. Anemone has its quiet and considered moments, but it’s mostly defined by jarring cuts that aren’t so much disorienting as they are distracting, and a haphazard momentum born of the camera swiftly pushing toward or pulling away from its characters, or zooming in and out for emphasis, no matter the occasion. Sometimes this results in magnificent and imaginative flair. As the brothers drunkenly dance in Ray’s cabin, the camera pulls so far back as to make them feel like figurines in a diorama, unaware of the larger forces controlling their lives across the decades. However, this approach proves indiscriminate. The camera swoops in and out for both revelatory moments as well as for the most mundane interactions, flattening the drama altogether.

If there’s a filmmaker whose work Ronan’s most resembles, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson—the masterful American auteur who directed his father in There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread (Daniel’s most recent role)—and whose moody ensemble piece Magnolia, a tale of broken parent-child relationships, feels like a key stylistic blueprint, down to its stormy climax. There’s even a quiet moment where the cast breaking out into a rendition of Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” doesn’t feel out of the question. The key difference, however, is that Anderson finds purposeful rhythm in each movement and aesthetic decision. Ronan isn’t quite there yet, but his voluminous flourishes and occasional dreamlike surrealism in the final act speak to a young filmmaker in the throes of trying to find his voice and coming achingly close. He falls short on most occasions, so it’s lucky that he has one of the greatest actors in the world at his disposal.

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