In Daniel Day-Lewis’ previous collaboration with writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, a crazed reference to milkshakes stuck in mind. In their new film together, Phantom Thread, Day-Lewis’ character goes on insanely about asparagus. Tossing a pinch of salt over his shoulder in his elegant dining room as if bidding himself good luck, Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis) tells off his companion, Alma (Vicky Krieps), in no uncertain terms. “I prefer my asparagus with oil and salt,” he yells, despite her evident pleasure in preparing a dish she thought he’d enjoy. And he goes on and on—about asparagus.
Phantom Thread is a strangely beautiful film set in the aristocratic highlands of 1950s London fashion. Reynolds is a couturier to royalty and high society. Nothing produced in his house is prêt-à-porter. Each dress is as unique as a wearable sculpture, a mobile in fabric tailored to fit the personality as well as the physique of the wearer.
But in ways unmeasurable, Reynolds is a tortured soul. For the furiously meticulous fashion titan, work permeates every facet of his life past the point of obsession. He chats up Alma, a charmingly awkward waitress whose Continental accent betrays her as out of place, but their first date climaxes when he uses her as a mannequin for a dress he’s designing. “You have no breasts,” he mentions. The diffident girl begins to apologize. Reynolds corrects her. “It’s my job to give you some—if I chose to.”
A hint of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo can be sensed in Reynolds’ compulsion to remake a woman according to his specifications. Reynolds has constructed a carefully curated world with himself at the center, assisted by his formidably haughty sister Cyril Woodcock (Lesley Manville). His life is as well ordered as an HO scale model railroad, and if he occasionally shows need for companions, he seeks to hold them distant.
“I’m a confirmed bachelor,” he tells Alma. “Marriage would make me deceitful,” he adds. A man of many secrets, he delights in sewing objects or messages inside the garments he weaves, invisible to the wearer and known only to him. It might seem that he speaks in the coded language of the era’s gay men, yet he appears too reticent for intimacy of any sort. Alma becomes frustrated and the plot follows the perverse and dangerous channels of desire.
With his thoughtful smile and occasionally devastated countenance, his imperious outbursts of anger when imperfection seeps into Reynolds’ comfortably cushioned existence, Day-Lewis has invested himself fully into what he asserts will be his final role.
Like the character Day-Lewis played in There Will Be Blood, the oil prospector Daniel Plainview, Reynolds is a compulsive perfectionist, a driven and mysterious man happier handling the tools of his trade than relating to people. Phantom Thread is tightly composed, furnished with a Merchant Ivory eye for period detail and moved along by an achingly Romantic score composed by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood. Many scenes are so quiet that every sound becomes acute as a knifepoint. One wonders if the obsessive men played by Day-Lewis mirror the director’s own quest for cinematic perfection.
