Daniel Day-Lewis Brings His Son Into the Family Business

In the overlong and overly portentous Anemone, stoic Irishman Jem (Sean Bean) says goodbye to good Irish woman Nessa (Samantha Morton) in the solid Irish middle class row house they share with her dour Irish son Brian (Samuel Bottomley). He then gets on his motorcycle and grimly rides to the Irish countryside, where he pulls out a small Ziploc bag marked ANEMONE and IN CASE OF EMERGENCY. Inside are the latitude and longitude coordinates for a dark secret buried deep in the woods: a recluse in a one-room cabin whom he hasn’t seen in twenty years and just so happens to be his rageful, self-loathing Irish brother Roy (Daniel Day-Lewis).

There’s essentially no dialogue for the first part of the film, an austere beginning to an immersive journey into feral nature and an even more feral man: ferocious winds combing through the tall grass of a ravishingly lensed field, verdant treetops seen from the first of countless drone shots, a radio broadcast chattering in the background, a lanky man grimly wrestling with his generator. The effect is arresting at first, even startling—especially when Roy senses Jem’s arrival and grabs a hatchet.

Anemone ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Ronan Day-Lewis
Written by: Ronan Day-Lewis, Daniel Day-Lewis
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green
Running time: 126 mins

And then the speechifying starts. Like any shut-in starved of conversation, Roy starts, slowly at first, and then with chatty determination, to spill his guts to Jem, whom the film eventually reveals as his brother. Roy shares a vulgar story about how his filled his belly with Guinness and curry, followed by a healthy dose of laxatives, before visiting the priest who molested him as a child and exacting his revenge with a blast of bowel-heavy punishment. “You’re going to hell, Roy,” says Jem. His brother glares back with a twinkle in his eye. “Family reunion?” he chortles.

Roy has much to confess—which is good because very little happens otherwise. The burden he carries involves his abandoned wife, his now-adult son that Roy deserted as a baby, and his time during the Troubles, Northern Ireland’s soul-shattering struggles against the United Kingdom. Towards the end of his 15-year stint as a soldier, he committed what he considered an act of mercy that others interpreted as a war crime.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this would be a two-hander between two brothers, but it’s not. Jem basically just bears witness to his tortured brother Roy, listening silently and occasionally interjecting a word or two while Roy pontificates at length about his personal sins against the world. His greatest regret was walking away from his family—especially his child. “We do love the exquisite agony of self-denial,” Roy says near the beginning of the film. More Irish words were never spoken.

Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis came out of an unofficial retirement to work with Ronan on his feature directing debut, a labor of love that unfortunately feels too labored to be completely satisfying. Anemone is what happens when a doting father and admiring son collaborate on an estranged-father-and-son story, ostensibly inspiring each other’s creativity but really just indulging their own worst instincts. Ronan captures expressionistic images, Daniel delivers expressionistic monologues.

This heartfelt production is an odd family curio, a sumptuously elemental display of rich, sometimes surreal visuals that punctuate a sparely plotted script of strung-together orations. Anemone is a fundamentally uncomplicated slog that doles out its meager exposition like a striptease in the hopes that it might make the whole exercise feel sophisticated and complex. As a drama, it falls short; but the film is handsomely mounted and passionately acted, less a fully formed feature film and more of a show reel for an aspiring new director and a valedictory for an old-lion thespian discovering a knack for the written word.