ANEMONE FOR NOTHING

Opening here in the Valley today:

Anemone--As a movie star, Daniel Day-Lewis seems like an old gunfighter in a western; wishing he could hang up his six-shooters but repeatedly pulled back into the game for one more job. And any time he does, allegorically speaking, strap on his holsters, it's probably going to be worth a look.

This new movie, his first since Phantom Thread in 2017, is no exception. It's directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis from a script they wrote together. Day-Lewis pere plays Ray Stoker, a former English soldier who has withdrawn to live in a cabin deep in the woods, chopping firewood and eating sardines and silently exuding bitterness. One day his brother Jem (Sean Bean) shows up, delivering a letter. Jem, who now lives with Ray's wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and son Brian (Samuel Bottomley), wants Ray to return home with him, to connect with Brian, now brawling and otherwise screwing up.

It's immediately clear that Ray is deeply wounded in multiple ways, related both to his and Jem's Catholic upbringing and to his experiences as an occupier during The Troubles. Very, very gradually the details of the harrowing backstory emerge, and they're more or less what you might expect. Even though the movie's agonies are rooted in two of Britain's primal eldest curses, there's nothing particularly revelatory about them. But they allow Day-Lewis a series of opportunities for increasingly intense showcase acting.

Ray's fury and grief boil up almost into a kind of glee at times; at others he recounts his traumas straightforwardly. Either way, he's riveting. Adding this to his gallery of roles, from the homicidal ire of his Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood to his subtly comic passive aggression as Abraham Lincoln, it's hard not to conclude that Day-Lewis is simply one of the best, most charismatic and most versatile actors in the history of movies.

It should be said that while Sean Bean's role consists mostly of glowering at Day-Lewis while watching him act, he too holds his own with a veteran star's presence. Samantha Morton and the rest of the small cast are entirely convincing as well.

The movie isn't just an acting vehicle, however; despite the bleak story, it's visually sumptuous, almost hallucinatory at times. The verdant forest, seen from above, has a fairy-tale atmosphere, and the thrashing limbs of the trees seem almost to externalize Ray's seething soul. As a director, Day-Lewis fils seems like a potentially talented new gunfighter.