Daniel Day-Lewis returns to the screen

   

  Unfortunately,  the focus of the new film, Anemone, centers on actor Daniel Day-Lewis’s emergence from a retirement he declared after the release of Phantom Thread eight years ago. Because the celebrated actor has created indelible screen performances in movies such as There Will Be Blood (2007), Lincoln (2012), and more, a new work from Day-Lewis creates an out-sized load of expectation.

   Sadly, Anemone can't stand up to the pressure of our justifiable expectations. Made in collaboration with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, who directed and  co-wrote the screenplay with his father, the movie puts a tortured soul at its core but never feels fully realized.

   Early on, Ronan Day-Lewis relies on arty, sometimes over-composed shots of the woods where Day-Lewis’s Ray has been living for 20 years. A visit from his brother Jem (Sean Bean) disrupts Ray's hermetic existence. Embittered and boiling with unexpressed fury, Ray doesn’t welcome the reunion.

  Ray, of course, is no Thoreau figure transposed to the wilds of Northern England. He finds no solace in nature or anything else. He has devoted his life to the shame-filled brooding that resulted from his service during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. When Ray picks up a hatchet, you fear what he might do with it.

  Ray protects two secrets that explain his willed isolation. He's also never seen the son he abandoned when he took to the forest. That's plenty of dramatic fodder, but the material might have worked better as a play, a two-hander that needed no other characters beyond Ray and his brother.

   Additional characters do, however, appear. Samuel Bottomley plays Brian, Ray’s son, a young man who has gone AWOL from the Army, and Samantha Morton, portrays Brian’s mother. Her hope is that Ray will return to help Brian straighten himself out, to fill in the blanks that Brian has lived with concerning his radically absent father.

     Ray's slowly disclosed secrets prove insufficient to stave off the dullness that results from slow pacing and lingering images that encourage contemplation when there doesn’t seem to be much on which to dwell. A couple of surreal touches don't help, either.

   Despite its small supporting cast, the movie remains Day-Lewis’s. His performance includes two spellbinding monologues.

   Like just about everyone else on the planet, I’ve never felt anything less than admiration for Day-Lewis’s command of the screen. Even when Day-Lewis has his back to the camera, you feel Ray's foreboding presence. 

    So, yes, Day-Lewis still compels, but Anemone might not have been the best opportunity to once again display the mixture of talent, intelligence, and commitment that makes him so great.

He wants to control ... well ... everything

Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps play a challenging duet in director Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, a movie about a tyrannical fashion designer.

In what he says is his last screen performance, Daniel Day-Lewis reunites with director Paul Thomas Anderson (Let There Be Blood) to play a fastidious clothing designer who plies his trade in London of the 1950s. Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock (I leave it to you to deconstruct the surname) dresses women in ways that tend to stamp them with an identity: his. He designs, measures and sews until every woman who wears one of his gowns becomes a perfect representation of one of his sought-after visions.

It’s impossible (and perhaps inadvisable) to watch Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread without considering Woodcock as the embodiment of a certain kind of meticulous artist. His creations can have flourish and sweep, but they are also marked by an attention to detail that goes beyond obsessive to touch the border of tyrannical.

For Woodcock, the dress eclipses the importance of the woman who wears it. He considers himself a visionary, but he works in the world of fashion where whim and shifting tastes can undo a reputation.

A bachelor when we meet him, Woodcock allows his sister (Lesley Manville) to keep his business on track. She’s a guardian and facilitator, the woman who takes care of all the details that Woodcock prefers to ignore. She knows that Woodcock requires space to create. A finely tuned instrument, he can be thrown off by the sound of toast that’s too noisily buttered or a vegetable that's not cooked to his exacting specifications.

Looking gaunt and composed with gray hair swept back to emphasize a steep brow, Day-Lewis takes the full measure of this unusual man, an artist for whom the external world poses constant threats to his powers of concentration.

In Phantom Thread, Anderson creates an intricately designed illusion: A small movie, Phantom Thread suggests big themes, even as it offers helpings of mischievous humor.

Initially, Anderson devotes the movie to establishing Woodcock’s world, a domain over which he exerts absolute control — until the arrival of Alma (Vicky Krieps), a waitress in a country restaurant where Woodcock happens to dine. Woodcock invites Alma to become one of his models.

Alma replaces Johanna (Camilla Rutherford), a model who became a little too demanding for Woodcock’s taste.
When Woodcock brings Alma to his home, he tells her that her imperfections — she cites her small breasts — are not problems, at all. She's the landscape on which the great Woodcock will create his next masterpiece.

Not surprisingly, Alma soon begins to test Woodcock’s patience. She may not be quite as manageable as Woodcock initially hoped. Krieps gives Alma an assertive edge, and it becomes clear that this relationship will take over the movie: Woodcock and Alma are locked in a kind of dance in which he tries to exert his control and she resists.

By this time, Alma is living in Woodcock’s home, working full-time as his model and muse. But she refuses to disappear when he’d prefer not to see her.

Now, as is the case with most movies, it falls to Anderson to make something out of all that he has set in motion — with restraint, wit, and the precision of an elegant camera. Even in a character study, the characters eventually must do something. Anderson must take the finely spun cloth of the movie and weave it into something whole and finished.

How you respond to Phantom Thread may depend on what you make of the twist that Anderson brings to the movie.
I’m prepared to listen to those who disagree, but, for me, as Phantom Thread began adding a twist to the atmosphere Anderson creates, the movie's spell was broken for me. Little more can be said without introducing spoilers, so I’ll simply say that Anderson eventually defines what either can be viewed as a perfect match or a relationship of intricately blended perversities.

The performances are all first rate. By now, we all have come to appreciate Day-Lewis’ ability to inhabit characters in ways that are thorough and commanding without being showy. Watch Day-Lewis create Woodcock's smile, easy yet tentative, almost as if the designer's face is engaged in a game only he understands. Like everyone else who values his work, I hope that Day-Lewis reconsiders his proposed retirement.

Krieps gives the movie’s most surprising -- and in a way -- most dominant performance. Alma's disregard for the high pretenses of art border on a form of bullying. She brings an insistent presence to Woodcock's carefully managed home.

Phantom Thread stands as an absorbing work that proves mildly unfulfilling, a beautifully designed garment that ultimately hangs in a rather small closet. Put another way, what builds novel-like expectations at the outset winds up feeling like a short story by the end.

But that doesn't mean I wouldn't encourage you to see it -- for Day-Lewis, for Krieps and Manville, and for Anderson's insistence on making movies suited only to his own singular taste.

Spielberg, Day-Lewis tackle Lincoln

Though impressively thorough, Lincoln sometimes loses its way..

Steven Spielberg's Lincoln opened on both coasts last week, receiving mostly glowing reviews for its seriousness of purpose and for Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as a stooped but canny Lincoln, a president who knew how to use his homespun, country lawyer charm to great advantage. And, yes, just about everyone has applauded Spielberg's restraint, praising him for refusing to bury the story under swells of obvious sentiment or corn-fed patriotic goo.

All that's true. Tony Kushner, who wrote Angels in America and also co-authored the screenplay for Spielberg's Munich, has taken his cue from Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln , paying careful attention to the political in-fighting caused by Lincoln's insistence that the House of Representatives pass the 13th Amendment, the landmark piece of legislation that outlawed slavery.

Taking place two years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Spielberg's historical opus avoids towering, bio-pic sweep, focusing instead on the ways in which Lincoln plied his Democratic opponents (with jobs and other rewards) to encourage them to vote for the amendment. At the time, Republicans advanced progressive views on slavery and the Democrats insisted on preserving the status quo.

Lincoln also was operating under a deadline of sorts. By January of 1865, it had become apparent that the South would lose the war. Lincoln, who stalled a peace delegation of southerners, wanted slavery abolished before any truce could bring the secessionist southern states back into the union fold.

Day-Lewis's Lincoln seems happier if he can tickle the opposition into submission rather than clobber it into compliance. Lincoln likes to tell pointed stories that he finds terribly amusing and which encourage a good deal of eye-rolling among an entourage that sometimes finds itself eager to take less circuitous routes to the point.

The Lincoln we meet in Spielberg's movie is also a savvy wheeler-dealer who understands that persuasion sometimes requires pliable ethical standards. Spielberg & co. wouldn't have been wrong to see a bit of trenchant topicality in the story of a beleaguered president trying to work with a divided, recalcitrant Congress.

Daw-Lewis puts himself on the fast track for an Academy Award nomination by playing an iconic figure and trying to make him life-sized. He gives such a meticulous, carefully considered performance that I found myself wondering if he wasn't being a little too cautious.

I can't say that I felt as if I were watching Lincoln; I felt as if I were watching Day-Lewis interpret Lincoln, filtering my response to the performance through a stream of recurring questions: Did Lincoln really talk this way? Did he so seldom exude a sense of command?

Although Lincoln tells amusing stories, the real humor in the movie stems from Tommy Lee Jones, who pays the staunch abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens. Jones's caustic Stevens is an out-sized creation that enlivens the movie's sometimes subdued tone, reinforced by cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's fondness for dimly lit interiors, appropriate one supposes for the period.

As Mrs. Lincoln, Sally Field can be vivid, and, I think, right for the role. Bereft over the loss of a young son, she's terrified when her oldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) decides to join the Army. A scene in which Lincoln and Field's Mary Todd Lincoln fight over their children is one of the most fully realized in the movie. Unable to dissuade Robert from joining the army, Lincoln secures him a relatively safe staff position.

At times, I found myself thinking that if C-Span had existed in the 19th century, it might have looked a bit like Lincoln, particularly in scenes that take place on the House floor. And although Lincoln is no museum piece, not every scene springs fully to life, perhaps because the movie sometimes feels constricted by what may have felt like an obligation: Get the historical details right.

As befits a movie with a cast that seems the size of the entire Congress, Lincoln boasts a variety of notable appearances. Jared Harris portrays Ulysses S. Grant. David Strathairn is all starch and polish as Secretary of State William Seward, and an unrecognizable James Spader portrays W.N. Bilbo, a political operative who's not put off if asked to operate on the shady side of any ledger. You'll also find work from John Hawkes, Jackie Earle Haley, Hal Holbrook, and Tim Blake Nelson.

The movie opens with a ferocious battle scene, which probably was necessary. The cost of war weighs heavily on Lincoln and on the movie. We feel the sadness of unprecedented slaughter. I don't suppose I need to tell you how the story ends, although it's worth pointing out that Spielberg's ending (more epilogue than finale) leans toward hagiography; it's too much of a genuflection for a movie that has tried to avoid myth-making.

I certainly wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from seeing Lincoln, but I also would tell you that I watched this movie from the outside, always aware that I was seeing a re-enactment of history rather than experiencing a historical drama. Thorough, brilliantly competent and at times stirring, Lincoln has many obvious virtues, but it never quite attains the greatness its subject seems to demand.