On paper, Phantom
Thread seems like the farthest thing from my kind of movie. Period piece
costume dramas were never quite my thing, it can be incredibly dry at times,
and the story sounds familiar to the point of being archetypical. The only
thing about it that really caught my interest was that it’s spearheaded by Paul
Thomas Anderson, one of the most reliable directors working today. It doesn’t
have the fast-lane glamour of Boogie
Nights, it’s not a towering presence of There
Will Be Blood, nor is it a mind-bending puzzle like The Master, but Phantom
Thread is much more subdued than anything in the P.T. Anderson oeuvre, but
still has as many layers begging to be stripped away to reveal that it’s an
entirely different beast as the one presented. This is also supposedly the final
performance from method actor extraordinaire Daniel Day-Lewis, here in his
second collaboration with Anderson, so it would be interesting to see what note
he ends his staggering career on.
Our story follows Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a renowned
dressmaker to the stars who runs a tailor shop in post-war London. He is a
workaholic, articulate, obsessive, fastidious, content with bachelorhood in middle-age,
and prone to fits of melancholy triggered by the slightest distraction. He also
has a somewhat codependent bond with his iron-willed sister Cyril (Lesley Manville),
who runs the shop with her brother, shares many of his neuroses, and is often
left with the duty of smothering Reynolds’s many failed relationships the
minute they go south. That changes when he meets a young hotel waitress named
Alma (Vicky Krieps), who becomes his model, his muse, and eventually his lover.
But as soon as their romance takes off, Reynolds’s controlling nature surfaces,
with him dead-set on not letting his new lover’s presence disrupt the clockwork
routine of his work or private life by any means necessary.
It may not seem like it at first, but at its core, this
movie is a power struggle. It begins with one person having dominance in the
relationship, but it slowly pulls back the curtain to show that it’s not as
one-sided as we’re lead to believe. The story is narrated by one character but
shot from the perspective of another. Their dimensions aren’t immediately
clear, with the dynamic being about Reynolds and Alma coaxing their buried qualities
out of each other. A lot of this has to do with the acting. I don’t think I
need to elaborate that Daniel Day-Lewis gives a tremendous performance. In many
ways, Reynolds Woodcock is the polar opposite of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood: both are volatile tyrants
vying for absolute control of their world, but where Daniel is towering and
volcanic, Reynolds by comparison is dignified and quietly seething. Relative
newcomer Vicky Krieps manages to hold her own against him as Alma, which is no
easy feat for any actor (I think the best way to test any actor’s mettle is to
have them work opposite Daniel Day-Lewis), proving that she’s deceivingly assertive
in ways that both thrill and repel her new partner.
The dynamic between Alma and Reynolds is strange and alien,
and yet familiar. Reynolds’s constant rules and demands become toxic, but most
of the time he doesn’t realize that he’s doing it. And without getting into
spoilers, that toxicity does come back to bite him. But having the direction
coming from his point-of-view, we do get a sense of how he sees the world and
why he is the way he is. The sound-mixing makes his annoyance apparent in
certain scenes, where the sound of a knife scraping butter on bread or a stream
of tea pouring into a cup become as loud and hard to ignore as rush hour
traffic. The sparse but hauntingly beautiful score from Radiohead guitarist and
long-time Anderson collaborator Jonny Greenwood is one of the best I’ve heard
in a long time and adds to tension; not enough to feel like it’s going to snap
at any moment, but enough to make a pleasant hum when it’s plucked.
If it sounds like I’m being needlessly vague in my
description of what the movie is about, that’s because critics have been asked
to be mum about some of the movie’s major plot points, which more often than
not is just a ploy to give it an artificial sense of mystery as part of its
marketing (I’m looking at you, Blade
Runner 2049), but pulling the thread to watch the whole thing unravel is
half the journey. The closest comparison I can think of is last year’s The Handmaiden, another costume drama
that makes you question what you’ve been watching all along as it keeps going. It’s
also a bit like Mother!, in the sense
that the whole thing could be read as a metaphor for the difficulties of loving
an artist. But unlike either of them, this one is purposely sterile and sexless,
but nonetheless exhilarating.
Bottom line, Phantom
Thread is not quite what it seems. The direction from Paul Thomas Anderson
isn’t really flashy but still excellent, Daniel Day-Lewis once again proves why
he’s one of the best actors who ever lived, and the directions to story goes in
will keep you on your toes. Like the works of Charlotte Bronte and Flannery O’Connor,
it’s elegant yet sharp. Sophisticated yet quietly savage. Fashionable yet a bit
hard to breathe in.
8/10, Full Price
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