DAN WEBSTER:
As much as some of us revere great acting, not everyone who works in the film industry respects it as an art form. Katharine Hepburn, who famously won four Best Actress Academy Awards, reportedly said, “Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.”
That’s that same Hepburn, by the way, who was the target of Dorothy Parker’s biting joke that—depending on your source—had her describing Hepburn’s acting in a play as running “the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
Yet for all the talk of filmmakers as auteurs and the control that they have over what shows up on the screen, there is something to be said for the work done by the cast members on whom they focus their cameras. Movie stars as varied as Steven Seagal and Madonna on one end of the spectrum and Marlon Brando and Meryl Streep on the other capture our attention and, in many cases, make a difference in how we react to whatever they appear in.
And when it comes to acting greatness, the name Daniel Day-Lewis always tends to come up. As early as 1985, when the London-born actor appeared in two films—My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room With a View—Day-Lewis attracted acclaim for his range.
In the former he played a gay street punk, putting in a performance that, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote showed both “extraordinary technical flash and emotional substance.” In the latter, he was cast as—in the words of the Washington Post’s Paul Attanasio—a “sneering, priggish (but very proper) bookworm.”
Since then, Day-Lewis has appeared in more than two dozen films, winning three Best Actor Oscars for 1989’s My Left Foot, 2007’s There Will Be Blood and 2012’s Lincoln. And now, after taking a nine-year break since appearing in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis is back.
In Anemone, which was directed by Day-Lewis’ son—the visual artist Ronan Day-Lewis—and co-written by him and his father, Day-Lewis plays Ray, a former British soldier living in the kind of deep and dark woods that even Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother would avoid.
Ray is a troubled man, estranged from his ex-wife (played by Samantha Morton) and son (played by Samuel Bottomley), haunted both by memories of his strict, apparently violent father and of an act he’d committed years before that was deemed a war crime.
So when he’s visited by his brother Jem (played by Sean Bean), whose mission is to let Ray know that his son—himself a soldier and in trouble with the authorities—needs him, Ray is in no mood to play the polite host. Over a couple of days the two engage in the kind of give-and-take that verges on and, at times, results in bloodletting before Ray finally cracks.
As a story, Anemone offers nothing particularly original. The significance of the title—a blend of a colorful flower and a venomous aquatic invertebrate—can refer to mercurial Ray himself. But soldiers dealing with the horrors of war have been screen fodder since 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front.
What is novel about Anemone is director Day-Lewis’ attempt to balance his screenplay’s limitations with visuals that, at times, delve into the realm of magical realism. A vision of his ex-wife appears to Ray in what looks like a waking dream. Another of what may be an alien simulacrum of his son looms over a body of water. And one of a great, bloodied fish floats by in a river.
All those images, along with an ominous musical score by composer Bobby Krlic, make Anemone watchable, even over its two-hour-plus running time. For all his efforts, though, all that young Day-Lewis achieves in his first directing effort would be just another artsy attempt to portray the pain of a former soldier. That is, it would be if it weren’t for his father—a man considered by many to be one of the great screen actors of all time.
Not every moment works, but, when Day-Lewis is required to emote, Anemone becomes an exercise in acting that even Dorothy Parker would agree ranges from A all the way to the end of the end of the alphabet.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for spokesman.com.