Daniel Day-Lewis returns to a hut in a wood and gives his son Ronan two monologues worth the trip. Around them is a long, grey, hushed film that keeps telling us something terrible happened and mostly declines to make drama out of it.
Ronan Day-Lewis directs his first feature from a script written with his father, and it runs 125 minutes, nearly all of them in the rain. Jem Stoker (Sean Bean) walks into a wood to find his brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), who has lived there alone for years and wants to go on doing so. Jem has come to fetch him home for the sake of Ray’s son Brian (Samuel Bottomley), raised in Ray’s absence by Jem and Nessa (Samantha Morton). That is the whole engine of the film, and it is a sound one. The film is seriously acted, handsomely shot and, for long stretches, stuck.
Start with what works, because it works a great deal. Daniel Day-Lewis plays Ray as a man who has stopped using his voice and finds it rusty when he needs it. He eats like an animal, he laughs at nothing, and twice in the film he tells a story: one about a priest, one about his years as a soldier in Northern Ireland. We sat without moving through the first of these. The reason is that he tells it flat, the way people tell things they have told themselves a thousand times, and Ben Fordesman’s camera does not move either, so there is nothing to watch but a face deciding how much to admit. Both speeches would justify the ticket on their own. The trouble is that the film knows this too, and arranges itself around them like furniture.
Sean Bean has the quieter job and does it properly. His Jem is the brother who stayed, who prays, who absorbs Ray’s contempt without returning it, and Bean lets you see the cost of the patience without ever asking for credit. The scenes where the two of them simply sit, one talking and one not, are the best the film has after the monologues. Jane Petrie dresses Ray in layers of old army kit and Jem in a decent anorak, which tells you most of what the script spends an hour telling you.
Fordesman shoots the wood in flat grey-green light, wide and still, with the men small in the frame and the trees doing most of the acting. It is good to look at. A sequence at a river is the one place the images and the story pull in the same direction at the same time. Chris Oddy’s hut is exact: tarpaulin, a stove, tins stacked like a man who counts them, nothing that was not carried in by hand. The Haxan Cloak scores all of this with low electronic drones that tell us to be frightened of a scene in which two men are eating, and after the first few times we stopped believing the warning.
Then there is everything outside the wood. Nathan Nugent cuts away, every so often, to Nessa and Brian in their kitchen, and each time the film stops dead. Morton is given a worried face and little else to do with it. Brian’s trouble is announced rather than shown. Safia Oakley-Green’s Hattie is barely a part. The script keeps stating that terrible things were done and not forgiven, and it keeps stating it in the same place, in the same weather, to the same drone. By the ninetieth minute we were waiting, and then we were irritable about waiting, because the film plainly had its two best scenes behind it and seemed to know it. The last half hour turns to weather and symbol in ways we will not describe; we laughed once where we were not meant to.
As a debut it is not lazy. Ronan Day-Lewis frames with real care and trusts his actors with long silences, which is rarer in first films than it ought to be. What he has not yet learned is when a scene is finished. Set against the small, hard British films about damaged men it most resembles, this one is better acted than almost any of them and thinner than most.
See it if you have been waiting for Daniel Day-Lewis to come back, because for perhaps twenty minutes he is as good as he has ever been. At home you will be tempted to find those twenty minutes and skip the wood, and we would understand.
