Festival Review: Anemone (dir. Ronan Day-Lewis)
Plot in a nutshell
Jem (Sean Bean) goes on a mission to find his brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), who lives in the woods after cutting himself off from civilization as penance for past transgressions. Back home, a son and mother eagerly await news from Jem on whether he’s successful in convincing him to come back home.
The eagerly awaited return of Daniel Day-Lewis, probably the greatest actor of all time, is a bittersweet affair. He is tremendous, of course he is, in his son’s film Anemone. The trouble is the film is anything but. The technical execution and much of the writing reeks of everything a film school undergrad thinks art films are about. Extreme close ups to build mood, a garishly loud score aiming to burst your eardrums with capital A atmosphere, and symbolism so overt it makes you want to laugh.
The cast next to Day-Lewis, namely Bean and Samantha Morton who plays Nessa, the mother, are excellent. But they’re not given much because the entire thing (written by both father and son Day-Lewis) is centered around a couple of earth-shaking monologues written to be performed by the giant that is DDL. Each is a breathtaking verbal evisceration, the first targets religion, the second war, two of the darkest clouds that hovered over the Northern Ireland conflict known as The Troubles (1960s-1998).
The price of admission is worth it, I suppose, for those two seminal monologues. Other than that, Ronan Day-Lewis clearly has a good eye as some of the landscape shots are undoubtedly beautiful, but he has a ways to go yet when it comes to steady direction. Anemone is filled with gaps left by uncomfortable silences that the score and overt motifs can’t fill. A story that has great potential on the bonds between fathers and sons, and the trauma of war, is drowning in the sloppy mess of this film somewhere. I couldn’t find it, and after about an hour, I gave up trying, keeping one eye on the bright green Exit sign of the theatre while waiting for the next Daniel Day-Lewis scene to come.