On paper, Anemone sounds like a great idea. Rowan Day-Lewis, son of iconic three-time Oscar-winner Daniel, makes his directorial debut with a film co-written with and starring his father, whose eight-year remove from the big screen has only added to his elusive aura. Not only that, but this dual debut/comeback vehicle has its sights set on father-son relationships.
Particularly in relation to the baggage that fathers pass on to their sons – even if some of the relationships and backstory are molasses-slow to emerge. With almost no words and a stoic sense of purpose, Jem (Sean Bean) travels from his Northern England suburb into the vast countryside, guided by a single slip of paper that contains geographic coordinates. Is it a stealth government mission? Is he a hired killer? Everything is deliberately enigmatic, and the prolonged allotment of information does this film no favors. Rowan Day-Lewis’ film wants to explore the why of what happened, but Anemone doesn’t actually even dig too deep into the what.
Jem is actually there to visit his taciturn, hermetic brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), who has holed up in a cabin woods for years while Jem has played surrogate father to Ray’s teenage son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley) – and also lived with Ray’s former girlfriend, Nessa (Samantha Morton, saddled with a tremendously thankless role).
At the center of Anemone, premiering stateside this week at the New York Film Festival, is the notion of the ugly consequences of violence. Both Jem and Ray fought as soldiers fighting against the IRA during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Ray also avers that he experienced gross abuse as a child. Meanwhile, Ray’s past has resurfaced and caused bullies to torment Brian, whose response suggests he also might have a deep well of violent tendencies within him as well (maybe, sort of – we’re told this, but it’s vague). Through their oddly adversarial and oblique interaction, we gather that Jem is trying to get through to Ray and bring him back home to Brian. There’s little plot to Anemone, and what the Day-Lewises do have to parcel out they parcel out very slowly. And when they do, it’s very expository. Most of the information we learn comes either from Nessa directly asking “What do you know about The Troubles?” or a couple of overwrought monologues for Ray that do nothing to justify his abandonment of family duty.
The true nature of Anemone is that it is a play, grafted onto celluloid with some striking images and effects attached (Ben Fordesman’s cinematography is attractive, calling to mind Mark Romanek’s “The Perfect Drug” video). It is inert and stagey, self-satisfied but not self-aware. When the Day-Lewises do delve into specifics, like child abuse or bullying, the fit feels false (and usually, dropped altogether). And their efforts to expand the world of the film, like the inclusion of a girlfriend for Brian (Safia Oakley-Green) and a few scenes of Nessa in the workplace add nothing; they feel like filler. And the visual flourishes do nothing to add dimension. A climactic act of nature feels symbolic while elucidating very little. Perhaps worse, Ray eventually has an about-face that seems largely out-of-character. To add insult to injury, a spelled-out backstory alters more than justifies Ray’s choices and feels starkly at odds with the way the army would have behaved during the Troubles.
While it may sound like blasphemy, Daniel Day-Lewis cannot close the deal here, either. He doesn’t just nibble on the scenery, either, and in swallowing it whole, he only makes the film’s banal writing seem all the falser– while Bean’s stoicism is more grounded in a more realistic-seeming world. We need the two brothers to exist in the same world for any of what we see to matter. Instead, this kind of try-hard filmmaking leaves us with a first-pancake movie: It seems important, and it looks inviting, but it has nothing to say.
This film was screened at the 63rd New York Film Festival.
