Film reviews: Daniel Day-Lewis returns in Anemone — and it's good to have him back
Sean Bean and Daniel Day-Lewis in Anemone
- Anemone
- ★★★☆☆
- Cinematic release
EIGHT years on from his most recent big screen role in Phantom Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis returns in to remind us all what we’ve been missing.
Here he plays Ray, an ex-British Army soldier — who served his tours of duty in Northern Ireland — living as a hermit in a forest in Northern England and long since estranged from his wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and adult son Brian (Samuel Bottomley).
Tracked down by his brother Jem (Sean Bean), himself a former soldier, Ray learns that Brian is ‘a lost soul’ in dire need of the discipline only his father can provide.
In a conventional drama, Ray would likely leap at the opportunity for redemption, but Anemone, co-written by Daniel Day-Lewis and his son Ronan Day-Lewis, with Ronan directing, is not a film that hits the usual beats.
Instead, the story proceeds along parallel lines, with Nessa back in suburban Sheffield trying to persuade Brian that his father, whom Brian has never met, had good reasons for abandoning his family.
Meanwhile, in the forest, Ray and Jem tease out the ‘dirty little secret’ of Ray’s trauma by way of long monologues, pregnant silences, and outbursts of violence.
Those overly-wordy monologues and the switching back and forth between civilisation and wilderness give the film a rather static, stage-bound feel, a sense compounded by the large number of scenes shot in claustrophobically cramped interiors.
Meanwhile, the story itself is rather slight, no matter how much guilt and suffering the writing tries to pile on its characters’ shoulders.
That said, Daniel Day-Lewis is superb as the ‘deranged fugitive’ Ray, bringing his legendary intensity, physical and emotional, to bear as he creates a wonderfully complex character who is feral, haunted, and agonisingly aware of his own many failings.
It’s good to have him back.
- Die My Love
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
stars Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a writer who agrees to move from New York to rural Montana with Jackson (Robert Pattinson).
The remote setting should be idyllic for an author but when the couple’s baby son is born Grace finds herself isolated, lonely, and struggling with post-partum depression.
Co-written by Enda Walsh, Alice Birch, and Lynne Ramsey, with Ramsey directing, Die My Love opens with a series of impressionistic scenes in which Grace seems to be drifting along at the fringes of her life — the scene in which she idly creates a Jackson Pollock-style painting with her breastmilk is particularly striking.
Gradually, however, the story segues from impressionism to realism, a development that coincides with Grace’s increasingly erratic behaviour.
It also becomes clear that it’s not just her post-partum condition that is leaving Grace ‘a little bit loopy’: Frustrated creatively and sexually, Grace is a volcano about to erupt.
Lawrence delivers a career-best performance here, bravely leaning into the chaos of Grace’s character, and she gets strong support from Pattinson as the happy-go-lucky Jackson and Sissy Spacek as Grace’s mother-in-law Pam.
- The Choral
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
Set in a small English village in 1916, The Choral (12A) opens with choirmaster Dr Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) commissioned to direct an amateur choir as they attempt to stage Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius.
Guthrie isn’t a universally popular choice — he has his ‘peculiarities’, including a fondness for German culture and men — but it’s when Guthrie starts to remake The Dream of Gerontius as a kind of anti-war protest anthem, featuring wounded soldiers in the front ranks, that things start to get a bit sticky.
Written by Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner, The Choral is an ensemble piece that attempts to shoehorn a small orchestra’s worth of characters into its story, with the result that very few of the interwoven storylines are explored to any great depth.
Ralph Fiennes shines as the sniffy aesthete who unbends sufficiently to engineer an improbable triumph from adversity.
