Paul Thomas Anderson (2017)
James Bell’s piece in this month’s Sight & Sound suggests the title ‘refers to a term that seamstresses working in the East End of Victorian London used to describe the sensation they felt after emerging from long, repetitive hours in the workshop. After returning home exhausted, the women would find their hands moving involuntarily, their fingers clasped as though sewing invisible, “phantom” threads’. That chimes with the compulsive nature of the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film: the dress designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) treats his work as a quasi-priestly calling – he’s never really off duty. The time is the 1950s. The place is London -specifically, a grand house in Fitzrovia. This is where Reynolds lives, works and receives the wealthy clients who wear his gowns. The ménage also includes his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) and, as less permanent fixtures, a succession of younger women, in whom Reynolds has an always transient romantic and creative interest. Cyril helps run the ‘House of Woodcock’ both as a professional operation and in this more private aspect. She manages her brother’s business diary and the team of women who cut and stitch dresses. When the latest muse has served her purpose, Cyril makes the necessary arrangements. ‘What do you want to do about Johanna?’ Cyril asks Reynolds over breakfast, ‘She’s lovely but the time has come’. Johanna (Camilla Rutherford) promptly disappears from the film, soon to be replaced by Alma (Vicky Krieps). Reynolds first meets her when Alma is hotel waitressing in a seaside village where he goes on a rare, brief excursion. Her residence in the House of Woodcock proves more enduring than that of her predecessors. When Cyril asks her brother if she’s ripe for removal the answer is no. Alma disturbs the female hierarchy within the household, as well as Reynolds’s egocentric tyranny and emotional autonomy.
The main character of Phantom Thread is one of three perfectionist-obsessives involved: the others are P T Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis. The trio makes the film as a whole, like its principal location, luxuriously claustrophobic. The House of Woodcock, a chilly hothouse, is hermetically sealed – so much so that in one indoor sequence there, it’s almost startling to hear the traffic outside. Anderson, as well as writing and directing the piece, is also, for the first time, his own cinematographer. His attention to detail – to the textures and surfaces of things – is both magnetising and cloying: this is as true of food, drink and kitchen utensils as it is of Reynolds’s gowns (designed by Mark Bridges). Surfeit is conveyed verbally too, as in the opening conversation between Reynolds and Alma. His comically lengthy breakfast order in the hotel is Welsh rarebit with a poached egg, bacon, scones, butter, cream, jam, a pot of Lapsang Souchong and (after a pause) sausages. Daniel Day-Lewis invests the litany with layers of appetite – to witty but also nauseating effect. (That last quality isn’t confined to Reynolds’s personal discourse; it’s more offensively conspicuous in the socially and racially prejudiced world of his high-society customers.) Breakfast is, throughout the film, an important ritual. Reynolds warns at an early stage that ‘I can’t begin my day with a confrontation’. When Alma moves in, she commits the cardinal sin of buttering her toast so noisily that she disturbs the great man’s concentration.
The three main performers are another triumvirate in Phantom Thread. Their acting is quite exceptional – Anderson orchestrates it with great sensitivity to their distinctive physical presences and vocal styles. (Major American filmmakers often don’t ‘hear’ British English as well as their native tongue: Woody Allen is an example; Anderson, making his first film set in England, is an exception.) Vicky Krieps speaks more softly and with a gentler rhythm than Daniel Day-Lewis and Lesley Manville but Alma’s remarks can be just as incisive as those of Reynolds and Cyril. The changing flesh tones of Krieps’s face are extraordinarily expressive, for example in the scene in which Reynolds first takes Alma’s measurements and she stands in her petticoat, alarmed and embarrassed, as Cyril enters the room, enquires ‘Who’s this lovely creature making the house smell so nice?’ and, as she approaches Alma, definitely inhales. (Cyril’s analysis of what she smells includes not only the perfume Alma is wearing but also, as the younger woman anxiously admits, part of what she’s just had for dinner.) Alma’s surname is Elson; she has a continental European accent that’s hard to place (Krieps is Luxembourgian), though when she and Reynolds play backgammon, Alma counts in German. Since her backstory is of no interest to Reynolds, it’s right that Anderson doesn’t explain it in detail. Indeed, a rare instance of the camera movement seeming too deliberate occurs when a reference is made to ‘Jews during the War’ and Anderson cuts to Alma’s face, which hardens momentarily.
As Cyril, Lesley Manville far surpasses her work in Mike Leigh films like High Hopes and Another Year. Her pallor and short legs make for an almost comical contrast with Alma’s roseate litheness and Reynolds’s ranginess. While his movement is a kind of driven prowl, Manville suggests an odd mixture of martinet and underdog as the heels of Cyril’s shoes click in little steps across a wooden floor to open window shutters at the start of daily business in the House of Woodcock. Every inch the efficient, joyless administrator, Cyril appears to have emptied her life for the sake of her brother’s creative talents yet she’s far from powerless in their relationship. ‘Don’t pick a fight with me – you certainly won’t come out alive’, she coolly warns Reynolds at one point. This echoes the moment when, at one of their first meetings, he fixes his gaze on Alma and she smiles back, ‘If you want a staring contest you will lose’. Reynolds occasionally calls Cyril ‘old so and so’, a very barbed term of endearment. A sustained strength of Phantom Thread is that the balance of power in the three main relationships is never straightforward and doesn’t shift in crudely decisive ways.
Daniel Day-Lewis’s approach to creating his characters is notoriously obsessive. Perhaps he draws on that tendency here; in any case, the end justifies whatever means he has used to realise Reynolds Woodcock. To describe Day-Lewis as fully inhabiting the part is a large understatement. Reynolds first appears in a montage summarising his early morning routine: the force of fastidious personality conveyed by Day-Lewis in just a few seconds of shaving, then clipping nostril and ear hair, has to be seen to be believed. Until Alma starts to get under his skin, Reynolds, in the company of others, seems at once intimate and utterly remote. Quite how Day-Lewis achieves this combination is wonderfully mysterious but it makes sense: the charismatic egoism that he gives Reynolds welds the different sides together. His physical acting, especially in the episode that sees Reynolds fall ill from poisoned food, is impressive too. Daniel Day-Lewis presumably won’t win a fourth Academy Award for Phantom Thread but this is the best performance by a male actor in a leading role in a 2017 film. (I preferred his work here to his Oscar-winning turns in Anderson’s There Will Be Blood and Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.)
As The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice (2014) demonstrated, P T Anderson has been showing an increasing disregard if not for his audience then at least for making things easy for them. The do-not-disturb-artist-at-work conditions of Reynolds Woodcock’s life are reflected in the film that contains him: for a good part of its 130 minutes, Phantom Thread is absorbing while being, in plot terms, uneventful. There’s a built-in risk with this kind of piece that, if and when things start happening, they will seem incongruous and forced. Anderson’s solution to that problem is to make events so extravagantly bizarre – and immediately compelling – that they disarm criticism. The first example of this comes when Reynolds designs a costume for the marriage of Barbara Rose (Harriet Sansom Harris), an American heiress. At the wedding breakfast (breakfast again!) at which Reynolds and Alma are guests, Barbara Rose passes out drunk. In an earlier conversation, in which Reynolds pooh-poohs the idea of attending the event, his sister sharply reminds him that Barbara Rose ‘pays for this house’. Even if Cyril might say the same of other clients, what happens next seems unlikely: Reynolds and Alma, disgusted by Barbara Rose’s performance at the reception, confiscate her wedding dress while she’s still in it, sleeping off her stupor. There’s no follow-up to this breathtaking behaviour.
Next, Alma proposes to Cyril that the house be vacated so that she can prepare a surprise romantic dinner for Reynolds on his return from the afternoon walk that is part of his strict daily routine. Cyril thinks this a bad idea but improbably accepts the proposal. When he comes back to the Cyril-less house, Reynolds, of course, reacts badly. Even if Alma’s upset at this is understandable, her surprise is incomprehensible. Disbelief is then suspended thanks to the row that erupts between her and Reynolds. This is one of the most dynamically convincing screen arguments I can remember. It doesn’t feel either scripted or improvised (in the bad sense – when you feel the actors are making things up just to keep things going).
It’s in the light of this doomed-to-failure meal that Alma decides to prepare a different kind of delicacy for Reynolds – shavings of poisonous wild mushrooms in his tea – and the rest of the film takes shape. The mushrooms have their effect just as Reynolds is completing a wedding gown for a Belgian princess. In spite of Cyril’s best efforts, Alma obstinately stations herself at his bedside and nurses him back to health. Hardy (Brian Gleeson), the young doctor summoned by Cyril, even refers to Alma as ‘Mrs Woodcock’ and his mistake is only temporary: Reynolds proposes marriage and she accepts. From this point onwards, the pace picks up and Phantom Thread becomes more conventionally eventful. Married life doesn’t mellow Reynolds or modify his controlling demands; Alma wants the social fun available to her; Reynolds, resenting her disruptive influence, now tells Cyril it’s time for Alma to leave. His wife comes up with a different way out. She poisons Reynolds again: this time, it’s a mushroom omelette and he knows what he’s in for. Alma suggests to him that this how their marriage can work. She will poison him regularly – never enough to kill him, always enough to reduce him to helpless dependency on her. The sickbed episodes will recharge Reynolds’s creative batteries and reassuringly remind Alma that he can’t survive without her.
The main narrative is interspersed with brief pieces of conversation between Alma and a male interlocutor – revealed, about halfway through the film, as Dr Hardy. In the first bit of interview, placed right at the start, Alma speaks of her relationship with Reynolds in the present tense so it comes as no surprise that she stays the course. Her closing words are more unexpected. She looks forward not just to the foreseeable future of their partnership – children, a satisfying social life, continuing professional success – but to her relationship with Reynolds persisting through future lives beyond the present one: Alma is in for the infinitely long haul. This is the culmination of the film’s rather weak otherworldly motif. The first dress that Reynolds designed, when he was sixteen years old, was for the second marriage of his mother, now dead. The implication that the whole of his subsequent life has followed a pattern set by her is underlined at an early stage when Reynolds remarks to Cyril that he feels sure their mother is watching what he does – and that he finds the thought of this comforting, ‘not at all spooky’. (Cyril’s disconcerted face suggests it’s the other way round for her.) During his bout of food poisoning, the bedridden Reynolds sees the ghost of his mother, in her bridal gown. The film could do without this uninspired apparition (which also hints at an alternative, banal interpretation of its title). Even Daniel Day-Lewis can’t quite animate the moment.
The perverse modus vivendi finally arrived at by the principals is coherent with what’s gone before. Jonny Greenwood’s score plays an important part in this. Anderson uses it far from sparingly: as a result, the music does more than contribute to atmosphere scene by scene. It forms a persistent undercurrent, suggesting a potential for morbid melodrama that the story eventually expresses. Yet as the plot thickens, the drama thins. The grip of the Reynolds-Cyril-Alma power struggle loosens in the black-comedy climax. Switching late in the day to a firmer storytelling style, the film becomes somehow safer. (That’s evidently not the case if your mind works like the New Yorker’s Richard Brody’s[1] but whose does? Adam Mars-Jones’s TLS review is hypercritical and sometimes unfair but his summing up[2] comes as a relief, after reading Brody.) James Bell’s excellent S&S article incorporates a richly informative interview with Anderson, who describes the plethora of 1950s fashion world, music and movie references in, and influences on, the film. A certain type of cineaste will doubtless enjoy the end product as an opportunity to spot all these references but most of us can experience Phantom Thread as an integrated original. Unless you’re determined to do so, you won’t, for example, keep seeing Cyril as a descendant of Rebecca‘s Mrs Danvers. No less than Reynolds Woodcock’s haute couture, the people that Paul Thomas Anderson and his three leads have put on the screen are inspired creations.
6 February 2018
[1] Brody summarises Phantom Thread as follows: ‘The movie presents Anderson’s view of that open field of existence: namely, that it invites both the wildest fires of holy hell and a profound, mysterious love unlike any to be experienced elsewhere, an elevated and self-renewing path of creation, of mutual realization, which proves its own validity by risking self-destruction. The mixed motives and mixed emotions that arise from the mortal tension between Alma and Woodcock aren’t a sign of Anderson’s (or of his characters’) vagueness or uncertainty but a mark of the tragic fury of his drawing-room comedy—and the world-worn wisdom from which it arises. Fuse life and art, he suggests, only in anticipation of the greatest risks; prepare for the worst, knowing that it’s often indistinguishable from the best’.
[2] ‘A melodrama is what it is … and as it works itself out rather a silly one, with a resolution that may even excite the protest of laughter’.
