A Very British War Story

America makes films about the Vietnam War because they’re not really about that particular war. They became a vessel for late 20th century angst with an easy cutoff line because it happened over there, and in many ways that distance makes the wounded warrior figure easy to romanticize.

Those defining elements of the Vietnam movie are exactly why there are so few British films about the roiling conflict known as the Troubles. It wasn’t a distant conflict, but right there in communities in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. It’s too raw, too recent, and any story would be seen as taking sides.

The debut feature from Ronan Day-Lewis is that rarest of films, a movie about the Troubles and their devastating impact on the people involved in it. It is Coming Home for the Six Counties, a psychological study of two broken veterans – this time brothers but, as with Ashby’s classic, bound by one woman.

All that has rather unfortunately been overshadowed by the fact that Day-Lewis managed to lure his father, Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis, out of retirement to play the reclusive Ray. Since being demobbed, he’s hiding off the grid in a small, seemingly abandoned cottage in the woods, living an existence of gnostic retreat. He’s left his brother, Jem (Bean), to live his life, marry the woman they both love (Morton), and raise his son (Bottomley), a task that Jem has taken on happily, even though he knows that he’s her second choice. Of course, a reunion is inevitable, with Jem yomping to his brother’s exile where they drink and dance and fight and sit in silence while trying to unpack what it was that broke him.

The script, credited to both younger and older Day-Lewis, is a very British depiction of trauma, parsed and translated through the language of the British military of the 1980s when Ray and Jem were both stationed in Northern Ireland. There is no taking sides but rather an implication that, by the time they laced their boots, horrors were inevitable and just happened to swallow Ray more than Jem. They speak in code and shorthand, explaining little directly but rather depending on details: a turn of phrase, a shared half-story, a hat, a mirror on a wall, a single plate, an unopened letter. It’s the language of siblings who have seen too much together, yet much is lost between them in translation.

Anemone is deeply affecting when the younger Day-Lewis keeps his lens trained on Jem and Ray. That lens is obviously most easily drawn to his father as a Yorkshireman who has become a wild-eyed saint in permanent self-flagellation. It’s a desperately sad performance shrouded in mysticism and despair that shows Day-Lewis the actor hasn’t missed a beat in his exile (that said, both he and Morton have moments of rough accents). However, Anemone falls apart without Bean as Jem. His rough-hewn Northern charm is softened here by age, a little flab, and a determination to be gentle. The script doesn’t make him some blunt fool who thinks he can just drag Ray back to the real world, allowing Bean to carry his own damage from the conflict while acknowledging and nursing that of his brother.Unnecessary mystical elements of Anemone, expressed through strange dreams and inexplicable Fortean weather patterns, unsettle this lyrical interpersonal drama. However, they do not quite capsize it, even if their seeming intention to rewrite Ray as some primordial fallen hero seems superfluous. But when Day-Lewis and Bean are allowed to be real brothers in arms, Anemone truly blooms.

Anemone

2025, R, 121 mins. Directed by Ronan Day-Lewis. Starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Sean Bean, Samantha Morton, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green.

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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