It is often said of our greatest actors that they could compellingly recite the phone book.
There’s no doubt, just to continue that thought for a moment, that Daniel Day-Lewis is one of our greatest living actors — perhaps truly the best of them all. And so the first and most important thing to say about Anemone, a bleak, somber, absorbing but also sometimes frustratingly opaque collaboration with his director son Ronan, is that it’s brought Day-Lewis back. He told us eight years ago that he was done with acting, and we hoped he was exaggerating. At least for now, it seems he was.
As for the phone book: Well, there’s a moment here where you might wish that was indeed the content you were hearing. In one of two remarkable monologues that punctuate a movie otherwise spare with words, Day-Lewis, playing a bitter and lonely recluse, lets loose an anecdote so shockingly scatological and epically disgusting — the script is co-written by father and son, by the way — that it’s hard to erase from one’s mind (still trying, here). Somehow, he makes it more fascinating than revolting — but it’s a Herculean task, something Day-Lewis the actor is obviously no stranger to.
The film’s title refers to a flower that we briefly see growing in the lush woodlands where we find Day-Lewis’ character, Ray, eking out the sparest of existences. The father-son writers take their time explaining why exactly Ray has consigned himself to this solitary life, but we get a key hint in the first frames of the film — violent kids’ drawings, with stick figures carrying long guns, and severed limbs.
We soon learn that both Ray and brother Jem (Sean Bean) were British soldiers, veterans of the early days of the Northern Ireland troubles. They’re also victims of a violent childhood in care homes.
