Anemone

Anemone is the directorial debut of Ronan Day-Lewis. His father, Daniel, makes a return to the screen after nearly a decade, starring opposite Sean Bean. They play Irish brothers, with pasts involving priests, the IRA and flowers.  Bean’s character, Jem, has gone to speak to the hermit, Ray, leaving behind a son, Brian, and wife, Nessa. As it turns out, Nessa used to be with Ray, and Brian is Ray’s child, whom he abandoned before he was born, to be raised by his brother. In a film about trauma, there is both too much and too little about the deeper, emotional wounds on the psyche of children and parents.

Courtesy Focus Features

Instead, what we get is a film with a nearly two hour run time in which one character speaks, endlessly, while the other listens, barely reacting.  This is a film that tells, without showing, and when it attempts to show, it merely copies and confuses. There is a…brontosaurus? A Selkie? It appears in dreams of Ray’s, and seems to represent his pain. The neck is a face of the son he does not know, and its spine wraps up, in an L shape, around a beating heart, which forms an O, dips into a V shape and ends with an E. Is this supposed to spell love, and why should we care? Does this mean that love is what hurts and what he must face?

Maybe it would make more sense, or be something one could connect to, if there were any characters of note, here. Ray gets the most development, along with Nessa — a very fine Samantha Morton in a truly thankless part — yet they are also the talkers. The propound on what has transpired in a past we are never given a reason to care about, for characters that do nothing except talk in circles. If it was not for some lush photography and a reasonable score, the majority of this affair would be excruciatingly painful.

Courtesy Focus Features

As it stands, this is a master class in banality and self-serving filmmaking. A great actor like Daniel Day-Lewis should know better than to have turned in and accepted a script as weak as this. His son should have done more to liven the proceedings. Perhaps doing this as a stage play would be better, because a film must have motion, and this is one of the most inert works in many years. Full of empty, clumsy symbols and metaphors-often confused for one another-the film lumbers along, lulling a viewer into a nearly catatonic state. Drink a highly caffeinated beverage before you see this one.

There are times where the film seems about to open up, to breathe, and give the audience a reason to invest in these people. I do not think it is possible for these actors to give a bad performance, but this is a work where the script and lackluster direction lets them all down in the worst way possible. There is a hail storm, at one point, which seems to be a riff on the frogs from Magnolia, while there are many quick visual or tonal nods to better films, including Babel, Traffic, Wind that Shakes the Barley and even Name of the Father and The Boxer.

Courtesy Focus Features

This is part of the frustration with the film. Ronan Day-Lewis obviously  knows his cinema and knows how to put together a professional film. Why, then, is this work so utterly boring and devoid of life? Somber films are one thing, and contemplative material, when it works, can soar above most of cinema — see the work of Terrence Malick — but this is a disappointment. This one cannot be recommended. It is good to see Daniel Day-Lewis back on screen, and here is to hoping Ronan’s next work shows him getting out of his own way.

Anemone is now playing in theaters.