Movie Reaction: Phantom Thread

Formula: Gone Girl / The Devil Wears Prada

Here on this blog, I have a good-sized imposter complex. My credentials to write about movies are that I write a lot about movies. I haven't formally studied anything. I don't have an eye for the technical elements of a film and I rarely drill down beyond the names that make it on the movie poster. I'm getting better (just look at my early Reactions. Oy vey), but where I'm still the most self-conscious is when I don't "get" a filmmaker. There's a long list of guys (hopefully one day women too) who I bring up a lot because I either don't understand what they do or why they are considered so great. Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, Quinton Taratino, Yorgos Lanthimos, David Lynch. In all of these cases I haven't figured out if I disagree with the proclamations of greatness or if I'm missing something. Lynch is more of an enigma, Anderson is a stylistic clash, and Lanthimos bewilders me. Normally, I hedge my bets on all of these guys and say things like "I'll need to see that a second time to really form an opinion on it". It's a stall tactic and I admit it.

One guy that isn't a stall tactic for is Paul Thomas Anderson. I really do need to see his movies at least twice. Think of movies like a puzzle you are putting together. Sometimes you already know exactly what the completed puzzle is supposed to look like. Normally you at least know what it's supposed to look like broadly (a sleeping puppy in a basket, a sandy beach, The White Album, etc.). A PTA film is more like putting the puzzle together on the reverse side then flipping it over when it's done or if you were told it's suppose to be a duck and it turns out to be a tree. They don't reveal themselves early enough for once to be enough. That's almost explicitly the idea behind Magnolia. I spent all of Punch-Drunk Love trying to figure out if it should really be called a comedy. There Will Be Blood's cinematography dominated my first viewing of that. I was too busy being transfixed by Joanquin Phoenix and Phillip Seymour Hoffman's performances when I saw The Master to consider anything else. The LA noir mystery had all my focus in Inherent Vice. Only Boogie Nights seemed at all straight-forward and only just barely. Well, now it's happened again with his latest, Phantom Thread: a warped, comedic romance masked as a period drama that I'm going to need to rewatch.

Phantom Thread is set in 1950s England. Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) is an enormously successfully dressmaker with a rigid and unyielding lifestyle, mostly maintained by his sister, Cyrile (Lesley Manville) taking care of everything for him, including dumping his most recent mistress/muse. On a visit to his country estate (while Cyrile was dumping his latest girlfriend for him), Reynolds meets a waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). She falls hard for him, moves into his house, and finds it very difficult to keep his attention. It's hard to describe the rest of the film without giving the wrong impression. Alma proves why she's more worthy of sticking around than all Reynolds' past muses and it goes in some twisted places.

The one thing I wish someone would've told me going in is that it's OK to laugh. This is a funny movie, but the tone makes it seem like you shouldn't be laughing. When Reynolds is being obstinate, you can laugh. When Alma seems to be poking Reynolds just to irritate him, you can laugh. When Cyrile has had enough of Reynolds' shit and lets him know it, you can laugh. Put simply, this a RomCom from the guy who made There Will Be Blood. Or perhaps it's better to call this funny in the way that Punch-Drunk Love is. I was in a theater full of people (myself included) not prepared to find any of the film funny and that hurt how well it played.

The buried, uncomfortable comedy is one of the many PTA trademarks in the film. It also looks gorgeous. I've rarely cared so much about dresses in a movie. The elegance of the clothes and the Woodcock house offer eye candy throughout. Daniel Day-Lewis is very good, although he almost feels like a prominent supporting character. Krieps is the star of the movie. I worry that a lot of her character will be misunderstood. I certainly didn't get it at first. Part of the fun of the movie is seeing how she reveals herself in different ways over time. It's a deceptively layered performance. And, Lesley Manville is just delightful. She has one scene in particular (and you'll know which one when you see it) that is probably the highlight of the film for me.

PTA has a way of coming up with endings that appear to be out of rhythm with the rest of the movie. Frogs falling from the sky isn't something I expected from Magnolia, for example. I still maintain that the final act of There Will Be Blood is skips a phase in Daniel Plainview's development/deterioration. Phantom Thread also has an ending that made me say, "Wait.What?". In this case, I kind of loved it. It rejiggered my understanding of the rest of the movie but not in a twisty way. While I didn't love the movie overall - PTA's thematic choices never hit me quite right - it guaranteed that I'll be seeing it again for the new perspective on things.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend