Most Day-Lewis thing you’ll see all week: Anemone

Anemone establishes itself vividly, confidentally, and almost entirely non-verbally. A man prays and then leaves his family on an urgent mission. Another man waits alone in a remote cabin, clutching a nearby axe when he hears a noise at the door. The stakes seem high, the tension almost unbearable, the characters grimly determined. Something desperate is afoot. A suicide mission, a sleeper cell, a secret plot? Rain and violence are in the air in equal measure. Anemone is a movie about an approaching storm.

But when the clouds finally burst, part of the revelation is that this boldly directed movie is built on a facile script. The collapse is so disappointing that it’s hard to believe the writer is also the director. Ronan Day-Lewis shows a keen understanding of cinametic language, so why doesn’t he understand that his story is so pedestrian? How can someone so comfortable with sweeping grand imagery and bold symbolism resort to such threadbare melodrama? As Anemone gets down to the business of revealing its characters’ motivations and resolving their dramatic conflicts, it’s sense of ingenuity and daring falls away. What’s left is the stuff of workaday TV. The Day-Lewis heir has no clothes. 

What a terrible waste of Daniel Day-Lewis, our director and screenwriter’s father, returning to acting after nearly ten years away. To his credit, he throws himself into the maudlin monologues and pointless fisticuffs. He gamely rolls around in the narrative and the literal mud, bring the same ferocity he showed in There Will Be Blood, treating the material as seriously as if this were a Lincoln biopic, committing himself as madly as if he were wearing a tophat in a Martin Scorsese movie. And Sean Bean keeps pace with him faithfully, both men wearing their years proudly, looking every inch the grizzled veterans they are. Samantha Morton eats from a bag of crisps as well as either of them. There are also a couple of younger actors.