Well, holy shit. Pop the champagne, light the fireworks, and generally get hype. Daniel Day-Lewis is back, baby! The legendary actor has once again unretired himself to star in his son Ronan’s directorial debut, Anemone. It all started when Day-Lewis was papped on set by the Daily Mail, rocking a Triple H-style handlebar moustache on the back of a Union Jack-ified motorbike with apparent co-star Sean Bean. (The tabloid describes him as “unrecognisable,” but he’s hardly transformed a la Lincoln. Besides which, you wouldn’t ever mistake those eyes.) The movie, which he co-wrote, will concern “the intricate relationships between fathers, sons and brothers, as well as the ‘dynamics of familial bonds’,” per Variety.
So, great! Seven years is too long in the cold for an actor so magnificent as Day-Lewis, and one can only imagine that sitting thinkingly on park benches gets old. Naturally, the news of his return had us thinking about the great performances he has already brought to the screen. (He has never been a prolific actor, but that’s the essence of the Day-Lewis mythos: he arrives, he acts, he conquers the Oscars, he leaves.) There are the obvious candidates: There Will Be Blood, Lincoln, In the Name of the Father, My Left Foot, A Room With a View, Phantom Thread. But you know what doesn’t get enough praise — beloved so it is by Letterboxd-using film nerds — despite being his first collab with a master of such prestige as Martin Scorsese (and is hands-down top-tier Marty)? 1993’s The Age of Innocence, his ornate period piece navigating the social politics of high-society New York in the 1870s.
Ravishingly adapted from the Edith Wharton novel, it centres on the privileged young lawyer Newland Archer, played by Day-Lewis, who lives a life of restrained hedonism, bouncing between balls, lavish dinners and performances at the opera. He is engaged to May Welland (Winona Ryder), and they are considered a good pairing by their respective families, bringing with it an upgrade in Archer’s social standing. A grand life, all told, with little to worry about — you’d rather this than be a cowboy on the frontier some thousand miles west. That is until the arrival of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Countess Ellen Olenska, with whom Archer pursues a passionate, highly secret affair, and spends the remaining runtime yearning after her.