Daniel Day-Lewis is such a master of his craft that he could read the ingredients off a can of cat food and make it sound sinister, spiritual, or heartbreakingly tragic.
In the familial drama Anemone, he mesmerizes with two striking monologues: a grotesque tale of revenge on a childhood priest; the other, a painful, complicated memory that basically derailed his life. The problem is, those two great moments are really the only standouts in this strange, scrappy, arty mood piece directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis.
Daniel plays Ray Stoker, a man who dropped out of society, abruptly retreating to a cabin in the woods of Northern England after leaving his pregnant partner Nessa (the wasted Samantha Morton) without explanation. Now, 20 years later, Ray’s brother Jem (Sean Bean) who stepped in as a surrogate husband to raise Nessa’s son as his own, has now come to find his brother to hopefully bring him back to help the young, troubled Brian with his own unresolved demons about being abandoned by his bio-dad.
The bulk of the movie circles around the two men, who circle each other about the unresolved past and the more urgent present. It becomes clear that Ray has never read the letters from home, ensconced in his own reality. The idea of having a grown son feels completely unrelated to him. Ray comes across as a blowhard, enjoying shocking and kind of scaring Jem with his tales, but is still hiding the trauma that led him to abruptly walk away from his family years earlier. Jem, meanwhile, listens like a weary man who’ll have to pick up his brother’s broken pieces again.
The younger Day-Lewis made his way as a painter and that background is reflected in this film, his feature directorial debut. It certainly looks great. There are stunning images: of menacing black clouds releasing sheets of rain; of seaside dunes glowing with shimmering grass; treetops undulating in the wind like a sea anemone (though the title is based on a flower of the same name). A scene of an almost biblical, baseball-sized hail shower is literally and visually epic.
But there are also strange flourishes splashed with magical realism that seem thrown in because they look cool, like a glowing animal/humanoid creature by a pond, or a gigantic, iridescent fish carcass sweeping by in the river. An early jarring vision of a woman—tousled hair covering her face, looming over a startled Ray in the middle of the night—is surprising and arresting, then leads to… nothing. These moments of strange imagery are never explained, leaving them more of a head-scratcher than symbolically profound.
With a meandering screenplay, it’s well into the movie before it even addresses any of the characters’ connection to The Troubles in Ireland. This wouldn’t be a big deal really, except that the whole opening couple of minutes make a point to show a child’s Bayeux Tapestry-style illustration of Ireland’s decades-long violence. Anemone ultimately wants to be a story of how PTSD can destroy the life of not only the sufferer, but the lives of everyone around them. But the cryptic, roundabout way of exploring that idea proves unsatisfying.
