Butler's Cinema Scene

Daniel Day-Lewis

“PHANTOM THREAD” My rating: B 

130 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“Phantom Thread” is an exquisite love story.

“Phantom Thread” is a cynical black comedy.

That both of these statements are accurate suggests the complex mix of ideas, emotions and impulses percolating through Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film.

That “Phantom Thread” also features what is allegedly Daniel Day-Lewis final screen performance (he and Anderson collaborated earlier on “There Will Be Blood”) makes it a must-see event.

Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis) is the premiere dress designer in ’50s London. He caters to the rich and titled; his fashions are elegant and controversy-free.

His effete manner and rep as a lifelong bachelor might suggest to some that the graying Reynolds is gay, but they’d be wrong. Reynolds enjoys women on the physical level.  In fact, as the film begins he indicates over breakfast to  his sister-collaborator-facilitator  Cyril (Leslie Manville) that his current paramour has worn out her welcome.

It falls to Cyril to deliver the bad news and escort the rejected young woman from the premises; a great artist like Reynolds cannot be bothered with such mundane duties.

“Marriage would make me deceitful,” he says, as if using and discarding women somehow makes him honest.

Anderson’s screenplay follows Reynolds on a side trip to his family’s seaside cottage.  At a local tearoom he encounters  Alma (Vicky Krieps), an Eastern European immigrant waiting tables. She’s a woman with a real physical presence, not one of those wraithlike models he’s used to dealing with, and she knows nothing about Reynolds or his work.

Her lack of guile, non-glamorous appearance and forthright emotional bearing appeal hugely to the jaded dress designer. He brings her to London, installs her in his household, looks to her as his creative muse  and, finally, marries her: “I feel like I’ve been looking for your for a very long time.”

Vicky Krieps, Daniel Day-Lewis

And almost immediately he regrets that move.

In a scene remarkable for its barely concealed savagery and rude hilarity, the newlyweds sit down to breakfast.  It’s the most important meal of the day for Reynolds, not for any nutritional reason but because it is the first of many inviolable rituals which shape his working hours. He’s a creature of habit.

And now he finds himself trying to peacefully eat his eggs while Alma butters and consumes her toast, sounding in the process like an armored column advancing down a gravel road. (OK, let’s be honest.  Anderson cannily cranks up the volume on every scrape and crunch to suggest what torture this is to Reynolds’ sensitive artistic soul.)

Leslie Manville

From this point on Reynolds’ old habit of freezing out a no-longer desirable female takes over.  Alma tries to win him back by cooking a meal just for the two of them, something from her native land. Reynolds cannot hide his disgust: “I’m admiring my own gallantry for eating it the way you’ve prepared it.”

If you haven’t realized it by now, Reynolds is a bit of a shit. Even the fiercely loyal Cyril (Manville can steal a scene without a word) can see that her creepily class-conscious sibling has jumped the rails.

In the last reel “Phantom Thread” threatens to become a revenge/murder melodrama.

The key to all this is, not unexpectedly, Day-Lewis, who mixes charisma and epic self-absorption into a compelling/repelling package. Even if you end up hating Reynolds, you can’t help but find him totally entertaining.

“Phantom…” perfectly captures the look and feel of pre-Beatles London, and there’s a magnificent sequence midway through when Reynolds and his army of old-lady seamstresses must go into battle mode to save a dress that has been damaged on the eve of its debut.

Like all of Anderson’s films (among them “Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia” and “The Master”), this one focuses on a character for whom we have mixed feelings. The results are usually more intellectually intriguing than emotionally satisfying. But the sheer audacity of Anderson’s filmmaking technique — and the tremendous performances he often elicits — invariably save the day.

| Robert W.Butler