MOVIES
Daniel Day-Lewis’s swan song
In just over two decades Paul Thomas Anderson has shaped a career that makes him arguably the most constantly searching, widely ranging intellectual American director of his generation. His films are marked by their use of close-up, a carefully visually appropriate approach and a tendency to challenge audiences. In his latest – his second collaboration with Daniel Day-Lewis, Anderson creates an intriguing, beautiful and carefully controlled examination of eroticism, creativity and . . . um . . . the importance of breakfast.
Often unsettling, surprisingly humorous and continuously intriguing, it’s a meeting of a great director and a superlatively committed actor that lifts what may have been a quaint attempt to resurrect the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock into something more than just an homage to the tightly wound erotic tensions underplaying so much of classic British cinema.
Day-Lewis is Reynolds Woodcock, dressmaker to the full range of 1950s high society from movie stars to princesses to millionaire serial wives. He’s a handsome man of obsessive routine and narcissism, enabled by his stern but caring sister Cyril.
The House of Woodcock lives and succeeds under the ever-present eye of the ghost of Reynolds’s dead and much-missed mother, whose absence he fills with a long line of model muses. When he tires of them, Cyril dutifully steps in to quietly expel them.
On a break to the coast, Reynolds meets hotel waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps) and quickly moves to make her the next in his line of pretty Pygmalion ladies — but there’s something different about her that leads him and his art down a new, uncharted path.
Alma, more attuned than any of his previous partners to his need to occasionally be brought to a state of helplessness in search of mothering, is not like his other muses — she talks back, makes noise when she butters her toast in the morning and makes demands.
Slowly and claustrophobically Anderson ratchets up the tension to an almost unbearable level as the relationship moves into new territory for both.
It’s worth noting that before Martin Scorsese managed to convince him to return from a five-year hiatus from acting to play Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York, Day-Lewis had disappeared to Italy where he was deeply immersed in the world of shoemaking at the feet of an Italian master-cobbler. In the meticulously obsessive and self-absorbed character of Woodcock, Anderson has given the actor a perfect canvas for his own obsessive nature. This creates a space for one of the most gifted actors of any generation to create his most layered and intriguing performance to date.
With the help of a lush and traditional but constant and moving score by long-time collaborator Jonny Greenwood, and evocative cinematography by his own hand, Anderson has created a complicated and often wryly humorous portrait of post-war England and its social foibles that keeps you guessing till its 130th minute and leaves you confused and intrigued enough to return for a second viewing.
It’s also all the evidence you need that Day-Lewis’s stated aim of quitting acting for good after this may be right for him but is definitely wrong for the history of cinema.
An examination of eroticism, creativity and the importance of breakfast