If Phantom Thread is indeed Daniel Day-Lewis’ final foray into acting — the esteemed English performer announced his retirement in June — it’s a fitting farewell. Phantom Thread is quiet, slow and exquisite, with autobiographical undertones for both Day-Lewis and his director, the similarly pre-eminent Paul Thomas Anderson. Anderson and Day-Lewis are both masters of their crafts, and this is a film about another master, widely recognized for his genius but also isolated and lonesome because of it.
In 1950s Great Britain, Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock is an aging famous dressmaker. Woodcock is a revered and particular artist known for his attention to detail and his intricate, sophisticated designs. He is also a temperamental man, tortured and, as his love interest Alma — played by Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps — puts it, fussy. He despises the word “chic.” He despises being disturbed during his breakfast. He despises it when his designs are not treated with the proper degree of respect. He despises asparagus that has been prepared in oil rather than butter, and most of all, he despises outside forces imposing hiccups in his routine. Alma is the most significant of those forces.
Where Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood — his and Day-Lewis’ only other collaboration, which earned the latter an Oscar for Best Actor — was all bombast, and 2014’s Inherent Vice was all psychedelic sprawl, Phantom Thread is tonally more at home alongside 2012’s The Master. Both are character studies rooted in the grand but fragile egos of powerful men. But while The Master was about psychological trauma, Phantom is about control. Both films are seething cauldrons of tension, but while violence leads that tension to boil over again and again in Anderson’s previous works, here the excitement is in waiting to see if things will ever boil over at all.
As Alma, Krieps is both elegant and approachable, in her best moments extremely reminiscent of a young Meryl Streep. Like Streep, Krieps is quiet, steady and refined until she needs to summon visceral emotion — and in those moments, she burns bright and fiery. There is of course the question of male gaze here, and the issue of whether the female characters in Anderson’s universe exist mostly as plot devices and props for the male protagonist. Before Alma, Woodcock’s mistresses come and go. A team of women work under him, while his sister and business partner Cyril — played steadily by the excellent Lesley Manville — caters to his every whim. As someone who literally dresses women (princesses and socialites among them), Woodcock seems to think of them as sentient mannequins. But Alma is here to disabuse him of that notion, and I would argue that the most compelling element of Phantom Thread is Alma’s unwillingness to serve as yet another compliant prop in the House of Woodcock.
I imagine many Anderson acolytes — the ones who value the irony of Boogie Nights or the pomposity of Magnolia, for instance — will find this one of their least favorite PTA films. It’s a story that plays out like a novel about how deeply complicated people have deeply complicated relationships. If you’re sympathetic to Day-Lewis’ character, you might say it’s about how genius begets isolation. If you’re sympathetic to Krieps’ character, you might say it’s about how kowtowing to a privileged person — particularly a wealthy, straight white man — poisons everything and everyone around that person. Then again, you might not feel sympathy for either. To you, these might be a couple of fancy freaks who are simultaneously ideal and terrible for one another, discovering in their bizarre codependency a form of convoluted mommy-issue-centric fetishism.
I hesitate to go into great detail about Day-Lewis’ awe-inspiring performance or Anderson’s beautifully constructed shots because, well, everyone who’s seen any of their films knows they’re both singularly gifted artists. Day-Lewis is magnetic and transfixing, and Anderson’s attention to detail is breathtaking. So instead of asking, “Is Phantom Thread good?” (of course it’s good, you fool), the question is, “Is the film a fitting exit for one of the greatest actors of our time?”
It’s English. It’s dignified. It’s patiently and meticulously crafted, and it depicts an aging but impossibly-still-in-his-prime artist making a great life change while the public still yearns for his work. If he has to leave us, it’s hard to imagine a better way for him to do it.
