Got around to checking out Phantom Thread tonight and I wish I’d gone sooner. It was pretty great. I was concerned because I wasn’t the biggest fan of Paul Thomas Anderson’s last films (Inherent Vice and The Master) and, frankly, a 2+ hour movie about persnickety fashion designer didn’t seem like my cup of tea.
The film stars Daniel Day-Lewis in one of his patented amazing performances… if this dude acted as much as Meryl Streep, they’d just have to form one superactor, Voltron-style and illegitimatize all other actors. He plays a demanding, commanding, and persnickety fashion designer in the 1950s. He’s in demand by the rich and royal and he doesn’t have time for anyone’s annoyances and tendencies but his own. He’s a lot to deal with and some of the best bits of the film is seeing how people DO handle him.
He meets a younger waitress and they fall in love… or something like it. Maybe they fall in affectionate tolerance… but either way, the film is a bit of an abstract romance where one average woman tries to figure out how to love – or at least suffer – a conceited, self-absorbed wealthy genius. And how he – in some of the film’s better dark comedy – has to learn to suffer her applying butter to toast and poring water loudly.
The film starts out like a staid, uptight Merchant-Ivory film and slowly drifts into other, weirder territory. This isn’t a healthy relationship and it sometimes gets downright poisonous… but that’s the fun of the film: not knowing exactly where it’s going while it fussily exists in this apparently classy British drama.
The movie looks and sounds great… the score is all strings and piano and is gorgeous. The movie loves its fashion and era so if you like that sort of thing, you’ll like (if nothing else) how pretty it all is. As noted, Daniel Day-Lewis is great but so too is the leading lady (Vicky Creips) and the main character’s sister who is her own level of judgmental robot (Leslie Manville). As much as the film is about the relationship between Day-Lewis and Creips, its about the low-key struggle for power and influence in the fashion house. Manville’s performance is pretty great.
So, yes, I can’t say I’d recommend it to everyone. It is long and lingering on fashion and its lush score… but if you like that or can at least put up with it, the movie goes in some interesting and fascinating places. Some may not like where it ends up, but it’ll be interesting, fascinating, and divisive regardless. I kind of loved it.
Score: 89