The absolute authority and force of Daniel Day-Lewis carries this movie in the end, and what a pleasure to see his return to the screen. Without him, though, it might have been harder to take this film’s rather redundant, laborious dramatic gestures and its macho-sensitive narcissism. Even with Day-Lewis, in fact, there are tricky moments in the dialogue, and at the end of each of the two big speeches you might imagine a drama teacher saying: “… and … scene!”
Yet Day-Lewis’s instinctive command of the moment and address to the camera – that fascinating theatricality and artifice visible in even his most realist performances – make him endlessly watchable. He is supposed to be playing a former army sergeant here. I’d put his rank higher than that. It is a movie that Day-Lewis co-wrote with his son Ronan, who also directs. It’s about a father coming to terms with his neglect of his son. We must make of that what we will.
Day-Lewis plays Ray, a man living an ascetic, hermit existence in a remote forest hut somewhere near the coast in Britain in the late 1990s, radiating angry integrity and self-reliance, and cultivating the anemones that his father also used to grow. Watching this, I realised how much I want to see Day-Lewis play Timon of Athens.
Out of the blue, Ray’s brother Jem (played by Sean Bean) shows up on a mission to ask Ray to go home to his wife Nessa (Samantha Morton) and teen son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) – though this is the family Ray left long ago, with whom Jem has actually been living as husband and father, to Ray’s seething rage.
Brian has followed his dad by joining the army and is in deep trouble for violent brawling. He needs to reconnect with his dad, and both father and son (and brother) need to expunge their toxic masculinity and hurt. Ray must come to terms with the abuse done to him, and must talk about why he was forced out of the army after his last tour of duty in Northern Ireland, many years before. When we hear about those terrible events during the Troubles, though, it is a bit of a cheat. It’s made clear that Ray really isn’t guilty of anything that we might consider culpable – and yet Day-Lewis sells it magnificently. He can’t help looking like an exiled emperor.
This is a movie with, in the Scots phrase, no small opinion of itself; a movie of big scenes, big performances, big images, epiphanies and hallucinations. Not all of them work, but the presence of Day-Lewis settles and moors it.
