{"id":459082,"date":"2025-09-29T00:09:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T00:09:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/459082\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T00:09:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T00:09:11","slug":"daniel-day-lewis-returns-to-the-big-screen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/459082\/","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Day-Lewis Returns to the Big Screen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn \u201cAnemone<\/a>,\u201d which marks the return of Daniel Day-Lewis<\/a> to the big screen after his retirement <\/a>eight years ago (he needn\u2019t be ashamed of reneging on that \u2014 it just places him in the category of rock stars like David Bowie), the fabled 68-year-old actor plays a grizzled hermit with a silver-gray buzzcut and a handlebar mustache who lives in a cabin in the woods in Northern England. The character\u2019s name is Ray, and he\u2019s lugging around a couple of Big Secrets \u2014 though as the film starts to shade in his identity, you may think his principal secret is that in a past life he was at the center of a middling \u201990s art-house film produced by Miramax.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnemone\u201d \u2014 we\u2019ll get to that title in a moment, but for now just know that it\u2019s pronounced uh-NEM-uh-nee \u2014 is not a movie with a lot of dialogue, but over time Ray reveals himself in several extended monologues. The first of these is, quite simply, so gross that you can\u2019t quite fathom what you\u2019re hearing. Ray is telling the story of how he took revenge on the priest who molested him when he was growing up. Ray describes how he later had an encounter with the priest in which he pretended to come on to him, then had the priest lay down, face up, on the floor. Earlier that day, Ray had imbibed a special regimen of food and Guinness that would leave his bowels in a very active state; by the time he saw the priest, they were rumbling with need. And that\u2019s when he took down his trousers, crouched over the priest\u2019s face, and\u2026let loose. Trust me, I\u2019m describing this far more abstractly than Ray does, and Day-Lewis, his face rippled with a grin of malice, digs with hideous relish into the scatological description of what went down.<\/p>\n

\n\tThey used to say that Laurence Olivier was such a great actor that he could read the phone book and leave you entranced. But I\u2019m not sure that even Laurence Olivier could deliver this speech in \u201cAnemone\u201d and make you want to listen to it. Daniel Day-Lewis certainly can\u2019t (though he, for one, seems to be enjoying himself).<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAnemone\u201d includes several settings and a handful of austerely aesthetic woodland images, but the movie is basically a two-hander set in and around Ray\u2019s cabin. His brother, Jem (Sean Bean), has shown up to reconnect, and for a long time these two sit around not saying very much, pouring drinks and scowling at each other, at one point getting their ya-yas out with a midnight rock \u2018n\u2019 roll dance, then scowling some more.<\/p>\n

\n\tDay-Lewis doesn\u2019t have to remind us of what a brilliant actor he is (whenever he talks, we\u2019re hanging on each word). Yet over the course of his screen career, which encompassed just 21 movies, he gave performances that were startling and for the ages (\u201cMy Left Foot,\u201d \u201cThe Unbearable Lightness of Being,\u201d \u201cThere Will Be Blood,\u201d \u201cLincoln,\u201d \u201cThe Last of the Mohicans\u201d), and he also gave performances that were fine in a prosaic way and not especially memorable (\u201cThe Boxer,\u201d \u201cThe Ballad of Jack and Rose\u201d). This is one of those. It is, in the end, a rather recessive role, and maybe that\u2019s because on some level Day-Lewis doesn\u2019t want his comeback to overshadow the movie itself. He wants \u201cAnemone\u201d to be all about his son, 27-year-old Ronan Day-Lewis, who directed the film and co-wrote it with his father.<\/p>\n

\n\tI think it\u2019s touching that Daniel Day-Lewis came out of retirement to launch his son\u2019s movie career. That\u2019s a dad for you! And I have no problem with the nepo babyness of it all. But \u201cAnemone\u201d is still a dud of a movie \u2014 aridly pretentious and static, with too much self-conscious art photography and gloomsday indie rock and not enough drama. The film is driven by \u201cthemes\u201d that feel weirdly cherry-picked from other movies: child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church (a topic that\u2019s raised by Ray\u2019s monologue\u2026and never mentioned at any other point in the film); the trouble with the Troubles. It\u2019s all wrapped around a domestic saga that\u2019s supposed to give the movie heart but remains detached and unconvincing, as we learn that Jem and his partner, Nessa (Samantha Morton), have raised a son, Brian (Samuel Bottomley), who\u2019s closer to Ray than we think. The fact that both of them like to fight so much is our first clue.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are flashes of talent in \u201cAnemone.\u201d Ronan Day-Lewis, who has come up in the world as a visual artist, knows how to frame a shot, and he\u2019s canny about playing off the mystique of his father. The whole plot, with Jem entreating Ray to come out of his self-imposed exile, is almost a sly metaphor for how Daniel Day-Lewis would take a sabbatical from acting to become a cobbler or cabinet maker, or for his retirement now. Yet for most of its 125-minute running time, \u201cAnemone\u201d just sits there.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s another monologue, and this one, unlike the priest crap-a-thon, explains a lot, as Day-Lewis delivers it with a measured anguish. Ray, it seems, was a soldier in the British army, and one night he was ordered to patrol a house that the IRA was planning to attack. A bomb went off, destroying the people inside \u2014 or nearly so, as one young man lay nearly dead, his guts hanging out. Ray, in that moment, made a decision he thought was humane (and we in the audience would tend to agree). But he was accused of a war crime. This strikes us as an injustice \u2014 but just as much, it strikes us as puzzling. Why, in the middle of the Troubles, would this be a war crime? In the midst of the chaos and death of the bombing, how would anyone even know about it?<\/p>\n

\n\tThe anemone, incidentally, is a flower, and in the movie\u2019s grand scheme it means\u2026something meaningful (about loss and new beginnings). As does everything else in \u201cAnemone.\u201d As you watch the film, though, it\u2019s amazing how things that should mean a lot could come to so little, including the return of Daniel Day-Lewis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In \u201cAnemone,\u201d which marks the return of Daniel Day-Lewis to the big screen after his retirement eight years…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":459083,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[153812,68473,77,3943,73892,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-459082","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-anemone","9":"tag-daniel-day-lewis","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-york-film-festival","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115284683438175746","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=459082"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/459082\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/459083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=459082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=459082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=459082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}