Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest with Daniel Day-Lewis, Vicky Krieps, and Lesley Manville. Set in in the '50s.
Anyone else see it?
Running 73% on Rotten Tomatoes audience and 97% by “top critics”. All the acting is amazing. Beautifully filmed and scored. Fascinating characters even if we don’t particularly like any of them. Some moments that I was surprised to be the only one in the theater laughing out loud at. But while I get the psychology of the characters the end gets at, the reveal transition isn’t one that clicks everything together like that sort of reveal should. Not understanding the critics great love.
Yes, I said spoilers, but I don’t want to be the first to be overly explicit about them.
I agree with everything you say. I did find it a tiny bit long.
I’m going to go into spoilers, because people have been warned!
My interest in what was going to happen to Alma faded pretty much entirely after we saw her delicately eating toast without making any noise. At that point I was thinking “Why in the world are you sacrificing normal behavior for this jerk? Just so you can be around a jerk and his jerk sister?”
The ending was definitely a surprise for me. I did NOT see that coming.
I thought it was extremely well done, and the acting performances were great.
I had an interesting discussion with wonky afterward about the sister’s role and her feelings about Alma. I suspect I will largely be in the minority, but I felt like Cyril was actually relieved in the end. She’d spent what one assumes is her entire life trying to maintain the very delicate balance necessary to keep Reynolds from destroying his own life and the empire they’d built. While she initially was resistant to Alma’s encroachment (which I attribute to her assumption that Alma would ultimately be just another one of Reynolds’ passing fancies), Alma clearly and emphatically took charge of managing both Reynolds’ mood swings and the dress business when Reynolds couldn’t manage it.
I don’t think the scene at the end where Cyril takes the baby is a throwaway. I thought it was meant to show that while Cyril was still around and involved, she had a new and much more serene role in Reynolds’ life. I think Cyril was happy to have Reynolds be someone else’s problem, finally.
I don’t think you’re in the minority on that. Cyril and Alma have effectively become allies by the time he unravels in her office, and Cyril does say at a different point that she likes Alma.
I liked this film quite a lot - it surprised me in a very twisted way, which I appreciate.
We had a lot of discussion around when Reynolds really knew what Alma was up to. I think it was during the cooking scene, right before he swallowed, but that’s not 100% certain to me.
I took her saying that as her attempt not to directly attack Alma to Reynolds, because he’s the sort that would cling to Alma if Cyril expressed disapproval too soon.
I saw it recently and am still kind of mulling over my feelings about it.
I’m absolutely glad I saw it, if for no other reason than DDL’s superb performance - supposedly his last. Reynolds was such an entirely different character than any I’ve seen him play, yet like many of his roles, though he’s not likable, he’s mesmerizing.
Did anyone else have an issue with the chemistry between the two leads? I like Vicky Krieps and think she did fine with her role, yet I felt nothing between them, even at the beginning when he was courting her and they were getting along. Could that somehow have been a deliberate choice on the part of the director?
It was fun to see Harriet Sansom Harris (Barbara Rose). She’s always a good supporting actor and as usual, brought some humor, even if I didn’t really get what her character was all about. Apparently she passed out at the wedding but was she supposed to be drunk at the fitting? Mentally ill or just eccentric?
As I said, I’m still debating whether I liked it as a whole. The parts that make it up are very much worth watching, even if they don’t all come together like one of Reynolds Woodcock’s gowns.
Up until the point where Alma makes dinner for Reynolds I was thinking that I was enjoying this much more than I thought I would. And then the story made a very unexpected turn, and kept going and going…and i wound up really not liking this at all. Of the 7 Best Picture nominees I’ve seen this year it’s in last place, by far.
Same here, I thought it was absolutely brilliant.
I think a lot of viewers are disappointed in it because it’s totally unedifying, so to speak. There’s no sympathetic character to root for, there’s no satisfying resolution of a problem, there’s no epiphany or realization or happy ending or anything like that.
It’s just immensely insightful, as well as being beautifully done. It’s a really cold-blooded as well as clear-eyed exploration of the combination of artistic genius and domination with massive personal insecurity and fragility.
I think that was part of the point. Alma is not in any way the “heroine” of the movie. She isn’t rescuing anybody, not even herself.
If she had real courage and integrity, she’d face up to the fact that this guy is not really capable of an adult relationship and would Nora-Helmer herself right on out of his life. If she had no real strength and will, she would just feebly cling and fret and complain until she got kicked to the curb like all the previous mistresses.
But she’s got a combination of submissive dedication and ruthless determination that is way too three-dimensional for a classic “female love interest” movie role to contain. I agree it doesn’t make her sympathetic but I think it makes her incredibly interesting. Likewise, Reynolds’s own combination of autocratic tyranny and terrified fragility isn’t either heroic or villainous, in the conventional movie sense of heroes and villains, but it’s absolutely fascinating to watch.
This is very well described. I don’t really like either of them, but I’m fascinated by the way the pieces of their two distinct personalities came together.
If anyone is looking for charming asides, the older seamstresses, Nana and Biddy, are actual couturier workers, not actresses…Paul Thomas Anderson and DDL had been interviewing them, and were so charmed that they talked them into acting in the film.
On the one hand it’s a fairly decent movie.
On the other hand I am really tired of the Jeremy Irons and a much younger woman thing. I mean really, really tired of it.
He says he’s done making movies so maybe there won’t be any more of this cliché.
Did you type “Jeremy Irons” when you meant “Daniel Day-Lewis”? Irons doesn’t have anything to do with this film AFAIK, and AFAIK Day-Lewis is not generally known for roles played with a much younger love interest.
Actually, one of the magnificent things about this movie is how it subtly undercut this very cliche, and so many more of the standard Hollywood themes. In Phantom Thread, it’s not just middle-aged-reviewer fanservice to hand the aging lead a beautiful young woman. In-movie, it makes real sense that this ferociously insecure and driven late-middle-age artist seeks out a pliable young model/muse, and it makes real sense that this willful young woman with her own combination of insecurity and daring finds his challenge irresistible.
The best review I’ve seen describing the undermining of tired old tropes in Phantom Thread is this one by Sean Burns:
Hold, wait a second…
Ooops, major brain bloop.
I agree, I didn’t understand the initial attraction between Alma and Reynolds. He didn’t seem the type to find a tea shop waitress amusing. He might have been intrigued by her note and her self-possession but for a muse, she was pretty bland. Maybe her role was as the blank canvas for his designs however a muse is supposed to inspire. She wasn’t a good runway model and later on for some unexplained reason, she was wearing the white coat of the petites mains. The only scene where she was effective as a model was the photo shoot in which she wore a ball gown and he was sitting on the floor looking up at her.
The Barbara Rose scenes were so good. I believe the character was based on heiress Barbara Hutton, right down to the son, drinking and drug taking, and wedding to Porfirio Rubirosa.
I guess it might make her more interesting. I’m not convinced, but I’m not going to push back too hard. But Reynolds is in the same mold as umpteen other male characters whose abuse and viciousness is either explained or justified by his “genius” by moviemakers and other characters. It’s just in this case that his abuse is met with another form of abuse in return. Nothing about the underlying idea that male creativity must go hand-in-hand with bad behavior is ever challenged, just bolstered. Sure, he tolerates the bad behavior in return, but that’s just another trope of the bully having respect for another bully, at least to my eyes.
I was reminded of this while reading an article about women being pressured into nude scenes in films:
I can’t agree with this at all. Reynolds’ abuse and viciousness is explained (not justified) not by his artistic gifts, but by his massive insecurity and fragility.
His skin is so thin he can’t stand even a mild suggestion that somebody might like something to be different about one of his gowns. When he’s overcome by physical illness because of being literally poisoned, the first thing to get past his broken-down defenses is a muttered remark that his masterwork of a bridal gown is “ugly”. He is constantly consumed and haunted by the crushing fear that everything he accomplishes is actually just worthless shit. And any hint by anybody else that appears to corroborate that fear in any way is emotionally devastating to him.
None of this is made to look admirable or sympathetic, either. He’s about the weakest character that’s ever appeared in a movie, and we aren’t intended to like him. Nor is it claimed that this is somehow an inevitable aspect of genius. It’s an ineradicable aspect of his genius, yes, but we’re not being fobbed off with lazy tropes of brilliance as an excuse for bad behavior. It’s precisely those tropes (and several others) that are being dissected so sharply and clearly in Phantom Thread.
I disagree. I think the movie is portraying him as a bog-standard tortured genius.
I think the film portrays everyone in the film reacting to him that way. But I don’t think we’re supposed to walk away from the film thinking of him as a triumph despite his flaws. Quite the opposite, really. That’s where the difference lies for me.
Yeah, what Asimovian said.