Daniel Day-Lewis, left, and Sean Bean in director Ronan Day-Lewis’ Anemone. Daniel and Ronan wrote the script together.Courtesy of Focus Features/Focus Features
Anemone
Directed by Ronan Day-Lewis
Written by Ronan Day-Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis
Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean and Samantha Morton
Classification 14A; 121 minutes
Opens in select theatres Oct. 3
Nepotism isn’t exactly a fresh phenomenon when it comes to showbiz − if you want to get technical about it, Charlie Chaplin was a nepo baby of sorts − but it has reached dreadful new heights-slash-depths with this weekend’s release of Anemone. A dirge of a drama, the film is essentially a make-work project for the Day-Lewis clan, marking both the feature directorial debut of young visual artist Ronan and the long-awaited return of his ostensibly retired papa, Daniel (who hasn’t been on screen since 2017’s Phantom Thread).
While the project surely strengthened father-son bonds − in addition to the acting/directing collaboration, Daniel and Ronan co-wrote the film’s script together − the resulting production might have best been kept as an inside-the-family keepsake. Instead, audiences curious about whether talent is acquired via nature or nurture will surely walk out of Anemone wondering whether they should start cutting off their own children now, in a kind of preemptive strike against producing such portentousness.
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Half kitchen-sink drama about a broken family, half magical realist fantasy about the dark wonders of the mind, Anemone follows two estranged brothers, Jem (Sean Bean) and Ray (Day-Lewis), as they attempt to reconcile their pasts for the sake of the young man (Samuel Bottomley) who they both had a hand in raising. At once overwrought and obtuse, the Day-Lewis’s shared script fails to rise above bog-standard family melodrama, with its exhausting, circular ruminations about intergenerational trauma and guilt.
It is easy to see why financiers fell for the project, though. In addition to the irresistible allure of Daniel’s return to acting, the first third of Ronan’s debut features some impressive stylistic markers. With a thunderous score and wide-eyed view of the wilderness, the younger Day-Lewis makes clear that he is approaching the medium with ambition and verve − qualities that end up being undermined several times over by repetitive aesthetic choices, including some real groaners (such as an opening tracking shot depicting a child’s sketch of what Irish-British tensions looked like over the past half-century).
Courtesy of Focus Features/Focus Features
Mostly, though, Ronan stumbles hardest in his failure to control his performers, most notably dear old dad. While there are several moments in the film, including two extended monologues, that remind audiences just how ferociously committed a performer Daniel can be, so much of Anemone feels a few dozen workshops away from being camera-ready.
Certainly, the way that Bean seems to shrink himself in stature when facing off against the elder Day-Lewis is remarkable, given that the Game of Thrones star is so used to being the on-screen alpha. But Ronan doesn’t know what to do with either Samantha Morton (playing Jem’s wife, and Roy’s former lover) or the young Bottomley, whose character traits boil down to “sullen” and “bloody knuckles.”
By the time Roy encounters-slash-imagines a magical being of pure light in the woods − or when a mystical storm washes over all the characters, an indication that Ronan spent an awful lot of time watching the Magnolia-era work of Daniel’s last director, Paul Thomas Anderson − it’s clear that Anemone is a generation or two from full gestation.
