Family Matters: Film Review of Anemone
★★★
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Fathers pass down the family name, family traditions, history, religious beliefs, as well as the odd bits of wisdom to their sons. They may also, perhaps unwittingly, pass down their prejudices, hate, and fears—both personal and familial. Our parents are, after all, products of their social environments. The truth is sons and daughters, even as they struggle to find who they are, are more like their parents than they might care to admit.
Dramas—tragedies—from Antigone to Oedipus Rex to Hamlet to Death of a Salesman to The Godfather, and There Will Be Blood have examined the tensions between family and the individual, between social expectations and personal need, for centuries. Films like East of Eden, A League of their Own, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?explore the uglier sides of sibling rivalry. Family life, after all, is a concentrate of the best and worst in the web of human relationships. Ronan Day-Lewis’s film Anemone is the newest link in this eternal chain.
The film’s first ten minutes or so is marked by its stillness. The cinematography, static and tracking shots of lush woods and fields, throughout the opening sequences is breathtaking. At the beginning of the film, the camera lingers over the beautiful forests and grasslands of northern England, showing the land from a dizzying bird’s-eye view to the floors of the forest. The colors seem to jump out of the frame, almost to the point where I was wondering if some AI was involved, but no, the imagery was the result of simply brilliant human artistry.
There is only the most minimal dialogue early on in the film, with an added voice-over of Jem (Sean Bean) praying. A young man, his son Brian (Sam Bottomley) is crying on his bed and Nessie (Emily Watson) seems distraught as Jem leaves the house under a cloud of tension, apparently on his way to see his estranged brother, the notorious Ray Stoker (Daniel Day-Lewis).
This pervasive and tense silence, paired with the cloak-and-dagger tactics (like Jem tracking Ray’s reclusive cottage by latitude and longitude and camouflaging his motorcycle) lend an eerie air of suspense and tension to the narrative—minimal though it is. While the camera tracks Jem front-on, it only shows Ray from the rear, increasing the suspense of what this man might be. He is out there. Ray’s cottage is in a virtual wilderness, having only the barest of conveniences. A generator provides electricity and there is only a wood-burning stove for heat and cooking.
When Jem arrives at the cottage, Ray does not greet him. He pours a cup of tea and the two sit without speaking. The silence continues for some time. Ray prepares dinner and then brings out the bottle. It’s then that the brothers start to communicate. They speak about the old neighborhood and the past and their days of service in the Army, memories tinged with bitterness. Ray brings up an old parish priest, who had apparently abused them as young boys. Ray tells a long, convoluted, and rather nasty story about seeking out the priest and getting his revenge.
Ray puts on music, and in a rather contrived and somewhat surreal sequence, the brothers dance in a sort of primitivistic combative movement. Jem shows Ray a letter from Nessie, which he places with many other unopened letters from her. Ronan Day-Lewis inserts some directorial details. Ray does not offer Jem his bed; he ends up sleeping on the floor, and for dinner, he offers Jem the only bowl he has. Ray eats directly from the pot.
In another sequence echoing the sensibility and vibe of the dance, the brothers go swimming in the ocean, and the camera follows them as they play, spar, and wrestle in the water.; Ronan chooses to explain the brothers’ relationship through visuals rather than dialogue. By doing so, he not only increases the suspense and tension as to the nature of the visit as well as the reason Ray has chosen to seclude himself. It is a shrewd strategy. The viewer is drawn into the beautiful sprawling forest and the always ominous sky, scanning with the camera as it homes in on Ray’s cabin in the sea of brilliant emerald forest. The viewer is left to her own devices—at least until the characters start talking—to solve the Stoker family mystery by herself.
Director Ronan Day-Lewis (Daniel’s son) is a painter, and its influence on him as a filmmaker is obvious. The paint smudges are everywhere. The color palettes are beautifully rendered and seem coded. Brian’s room, outfit, and bedding are all shades of blue. Ray seems associated with the green of the woods, but that link changes as the film progresses.
There are also hints of expressionism and surrealism sprinkled throughout the film. The stormy skies, an unusual hailstorm blanketing the city, an odd dream-like creature Ray sees near a like, a sort of amoeba-like u-shaped creature with his son’s face. Later, he watches as a gigantic dying salmon (perhaps wounded by the hail) floats by him in the river, perhaps representative of a creature going home to its birthplace.
These are brilliantly rendered visuals, but they do little to advance the story. It seems unfortunate that once Ray starts talking and the secret behind Ray’s isolation is exposed, it seems as if the wonderfully suspenseful buildup has been wasted.
Ray’s self-inflicted isolation is disappointingly cliché, and unfortunately, the screenplay, while explicating the pain, guilt, shame, and suffering of one man, falls short of making it anything more than a pedestrian story.
Despite the phenomenal acting here, especially by Daniel Day-Lewis in his first appearance since his 2017 retirement, the story does not deliver. Lewis’s monologues are well-written and immaculately delivered, yet the surrounding cast seems to have been written as a bit of an afterthought.
The excellent Sean Bean is mostly reduced to nodding and smiling ruefully during Ray’s monologues. Samantha Morton is not given nearly enough to do; the Nessie character is little more than a cardboard cutout. The audience is exposed—almost overexposed—to the son Brian’s anguish but is given only the sketchiest reasons for his ennui and angst. The backstory seems a bit thin here.
There is much to like in Anemone, and I would recommend seeing it for the acting and cinematography. By themselves, they are worth the price of admission, but as a whole, Anemone is a disappointment. It is a film that dances on the edges of the unconscious and one which could have delved much more deeply into the specifically localized pain of family. Instead, the film moves around this heart of pain, coming close, but never quite hitting the target.
Perhaps the Day-Lewis father son team was too close to the subject to address it objectively, to address a subject that might have touched on their own relationship. Or perhaps the lack of communication was the point. We all know those father-son discussions can be difficult.