In “Anemone,” which marks the return of Daniel Day-Lewis to the big screen after his retirement eight years ago (he needn’t be ashamed of reneging on that — 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 the north of England. The character’s name is Ray, and he’s lugging around a couple of Big Secrets — 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 ’90s art-house film produced by Miramax.
“Anemone” — we’ll get to that title in a moment, but for now just know that it’s pronounced uh-NEM-uh-nee — 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’t quite fathom what you’re 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’s when he took down his trousers, crouched over the priest’s face, and…let loose. Trust me, I’m 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.
They used to say that Laurence Olivier was such a great actor that he could read the phone book and leave you entranced. But I’m not sure that even Laurence Olivier could deliver this speech in “Anemone” and make you want to listen to it. Daniel Day-Lewis certainly can’t (though he, for one, seems to be enjoying himself).
“Anemone” includes several settings and a handful of austerely aesthetic woodland images, but the movie is basically a two-hander set in and around Ray’s 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 ‘n’ roll dance, then scowling some more.
Day-Lewis doesn’t have to remind us of what a brilliant actor he is (whenever he talks, we’re 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 (“My Left Foot,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Lincoln,” “The Last of the Mohicans”), and he also gave performances that were fine in a prosaic way and not especially memorable (“The Boxer,” “The Ballad of Jack and Rose”). This is one of those. It is, in the end, a rather recessive role, and maybe that’s because on some level Day-Lewis doesn’t want his comeback to overshadow the movie itself. He wants “Anemone” to be all about his son, 27-year-old Ronan Day-Lewis, who directed the film and co-wrote it with his father.
I think it’s touching that Daniel Day-Lewis came out of retirement to launch his son’s movie career. That’s a dad for you! And I have no problem with the nepo babyness of it all. But “Anemone” is still a dud of a movie — aridly pretentious and static, with too much self-conscious art photography and gloomsday indie rock and not enough drama. The film is driven by “themes” that feel weirdly cherry-picked from other movies: child sexual abuse within the Catholic Church (a topic that’s raised by Ray’s monologue…and never mentioned at any other point in the film); the trouble with the Troubles. It’s all wrapped around a domestic saga that’s 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’s closer to Ray than we think. The fact that both of them like to fight so much is our first clue.
There are flashes of talent in “Anemone.” Ronan Day-Lewis, who has come up in the world as a visual artist, knows how to frame a shot, and he’s 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, “Anemone” just sits there.
There’s 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 — 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 — 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?
The anemone, incidentally, is a flower, and in the movie’s grand scheme it means…something meaningful (about loss and new beginnings). As does everything else in “Anemone.” As you watch the film, though, it’s amazing how things that should mean a lot could come to so little, including the return of Daniel Day-Lewis.