Phantom Thread - This Week At The Movies

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) is set in 1950s London, where acclaimed fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) create dresses for the great and good the world over. A confirmed bachelor his whole life, things start to change for Reynolds after he meets the strong-willed Alma (Vicky Krieps). Once controlled and planned, his carefully tailored life is now… disrupted by love.

Pros:

• The performances are superb, as you’d expect. Day-Lewis and Manville rightly deserve their Oscar nominations, and while relative newcomer Krieps didn’t get a nod, she is excellent as the wilful and determined Alma who disturbs the Woodcock’s clockwork routine. DDL – as I like to call him – may suggest retirement after every film, but considering how much he’s obviously enjoying playing the starchy and snappish Reynolds, I sincerely doubt this will be his last big screen performance.
• On the surface, Phantom Thread looks like a traditional tortured love story, but there’s a twisted and more gothic element hidden here, layered with a rich, dark humour, that makes things much more interesting. Bizarrely, even if it didn’t have this unusual underbelly – which I won’t reveal just now of course – it’s still a treat to watch an increasingly rare “relationship movie” in the 21st century. Two actors playing lovers in a tumultuous relationship, holding the audience’s attention… who’d have thought it?
• 1950s London’s high fashion sphere is not the best known cinematic setting, but the way Anderson has reconstructed it, you’re curious about every button, every hem, every choice of cloth. If you let yourself fall into its stilted, British, archaic ways, this is a gorgeous and fascinating world.

Cons:

• It will not be one for everyone. It’s a drama, a romance, a relationship film… and then it zigs into a gothic fairy tale of a sort. It is distinctly itself, making few allowances for the casual cinemagoer. Plus, it’s long, coming in at two hours ten minutes. I hesitate to overuse the phrase ‘clever-clever’, but there’s a certain amount of ‘pushing your glasses up your nose’ here, and if you’ve found Anderson’s previous world not to your taste, this may not change your mind.
• There’s a fussy, prickly shallowness inherent in depicting fussy people, and that will rub many up the wrong way. Why should we care about Reynolds, this cantankerous know-it-all who uses and forgets most women he meets? Without Vicky Krieps’s warm and likeable Alma, this would be a very cold film, but Reynolds’ thawing and Alba’s hardening is the movie, so there you have it.
• The ending somehow feels rushed, a bit “Huh?”. You may well walk out of the cinema scratching your head as the final act seems to contain all the truly original material here, and the speed with which it delivered compared to the first two thirds could not sit well for some.

Three word review: Daniel Day-Lewis’s ‘last’ bow