Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the finest actors of his generation, has emerged from his eight-year “retirement” to star in Anemone, the feature debut of his son, Ronan Day-Lewis. You can’t exactly dance around the fact such a film likely wouldn’t exist without the grace of this familial connection (the film also stars major talents Sean Bean and Samantha Morton).
Any industry-wide structural issues aside, what Anemone is and what it fails to be is much better explained by the fact Ronan is otherwise a painter, and that he co-wrote his script with his father, who’s spent a career finessing a piercing, primordial kind of male anguish. Anemone tangles up these aspects in a rather confused, disjointed way.
