Film review: ‘The Phantom Thread’

Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in “Phantom Thread” is so overwhelming that director Paul Thomas Anderson’s camera, and even the excellent score by Jonny Greenwood, seems in awe of him. Just watching Day-Lewis’s character, couturier Reynolds Woodcock, pull on his fuchsia socks in the morning is riveting.

While an infinity of Marvel films searches for a frightening, all-powerful villain to pit against their computer-generated heroes, they can only wonder at the galactic clout of Reynolds in “Phantom Thread,” obscenely beautiful brushing his hair back and donning his double- breasted charcoal suit and bowtie.

Reynolds and his equally formidable sister Cyril (the superb Lesley Manville) run the couture House of Woodcock and the literal Woodcock house - each of which has its rigid demands. After an exhaustive dress-making session, after which his lover has the gall to confront him over breakfast, Reynolds decrees, “I cannot begin my day with a confrontation,” and dismisses the woman (or, better said, has Cyril dismiss the woman).

Reynolds carries their deceased mother with him everywhere - a lock of her hair is sewn into his topcoat - and Cyril, affectionately referred to by her brother as “my old so-and-so” holds the business together. When asked if a client will be buried in one of his ensembles Reynolds replies that if she were, Cyril would dig her up and sell the dress again.

As a break from the needle, Reynolds retires to the country - in a glorious tweed and flannel outfit - and begins his holiday by ordering a breakfast of prodigious proportion: bacon and sausage, scones and rarebit, butter and jam (not strawberry). He notes the woman taking his order and, in a breathtakingly seductive moment, asks if she can remember everything and takes the list from her pad. The woman is Alma (a soulful Vicky Krieps) and she is already under the sway of his boldness. He lets slip, “You’re making me extremely hungry.”

She is soon installed in the house as a model and seamstress, enjoying with Cyril the designer’s many hilarious outbursts of artistic pique. To offer small a sampling… On tea brought at the wrong time: “The tea is leaving but the interruption is staying right here.” On inelegantly buttered toast and clanking tableware: “There’s entirely too much movement at breakfast.” On new fashion terms: “Don’t you start using that filthy little word, ‘chic.’”

A hopeless fusspot, Reynolds must collect himself when Alma cooks him a surprise dinner and, unsure of how to split the difference between casual and formal, he comes down for the meal in pajamas, dinner jacket and ascot. Predictably, there’s an uproarious eruption about whether asparagus ought to be paired with butter or oil.

As the poet said, love is a battlefield and Reynolds is soon shooting Alma vengeful glances while she takes up interesting reading, like a book on identifying poisonous mushrooms (it would have been a quite useful tome for Christopher McCandless, of “Into the Wild” infamy).

The cinematography is by Anderson himself on 70mm film. Transitions between resplendent interior shots of Woodhouse at work and set pieces of spectacular fetes are done in lush, aching fades.

“Phantom Thread” works to an oddly breathtaking climax in which Reynolds insists that he must create for a princess “the only wedding dress ever made.” Like all his work, it is heartrendingly gorgeous and requires surgical, all-night work by the atelier - photographed with a breathlessness that’s both absurd and absurdly moving.

The film is about the carapaces - physical and emotional - that we wear against dust and ghosts and time. It’s about a great artist seeking a monastic life one moment and the company of his beloved the next. The whole world over, there seems nothing as exacting as eyes of Reynolds Woodcock, of Daniel Day-Lewis, of Paul Thomas Anderson.