PIN ANOTHER OSCAR ON DAN THE TAILOR MAN
He’s already got three gongs, but spellbinding Daniel Day-Lewis deserves a fourth for this top-class yarn
Nobody should be at all surprised that daniel day-Lewis, who says this is his valedictory bow as an actor, has already been honoured with an Academy Award nomination for his performance in writer- director Paul Thomas Anderson’s exquisite period drama Phantom Thread.
The smart money says next month’s oscar for best Actor will go to Gary oldman, for his vivid portrayal of Winston Churchill in darkest Hour. but if I had a vote, I wouldn’t hesitate to bestow the coveted statuette on day-Lewis, already a three-times oscar winner, and not just to mark his regrettable withdrawal from the spotlight.
What a loss he will be to the acting profession. He is simply spellbinding as Reynolds Woodcock, a celebrated couturier in Fifties London, who lives in stucco splendour with his ‘old soandso’, his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), and whatever woman happens to be currently in his thrall and his favour.
At the start of the film, he has become bored with his latest female companion. Cyril, who manages his affairs with icy efficiency, pays the woman off with a frock. but Reynolds is a serial monogamist and can’t be alone for long.
Soon, while staying at his house in the country, he has fallen headlong for a pretty foreign waitress — and she for him.
This is Alma ( Luxembourg actress Vicky Krieps, perfectly cast), whose nationality, like the year in which the story is set, is never revealed. We assume her to be German. We are also led to believe that she is the fly and Reynolds the spider in this burgeoning affair, but Anderson feeds us intriguing hints that it might not always be so.
‘If you want to have a staring contest with me, you will lose,’ she says, only half-playfully, as he gazes at her on their first date.
Initially, they bond over breakfast. She takes his order for a vast spread, and swoons over his enormous appetite while he swoons over her. but, after she becomes his model and muse, breakfast begins to symbolise the fissures in their relationship. He can’t bear noise and she butters her toast too loudly.
Reynolds is charismatic, debonair and brilliant, but also prissily effete and monstrously controlling. He is said to be inspired partly by the discreetly gay royal dressmaker Norman Hartnell, although Reynolds appears to be entirely heterosexual. day-Lewis, in that singular day-Lewis way, doesn’t just play him but entirely inhabits him, just as he did the ruthless oilman daniel Plainview when he last worked with Anderson, in 2007’s There Will be blood.
At the beginning, as Reynolds gets ready for his day, pulling on his pink knee-length socks and fastidiously plucking his nasal hair, we really could be settling down to a documentary. Instead, Phantom Thread is a riveting psychological study of which Hitchcock might
have been proud ( indeed, reynolds has a fixation with his dead mother more than a little reminiscent of Psycho’s Norman Bates).
It is also a love story but, perhaps above all, it’s a finely nuanced comedy of manners. I’ve seen it twice and relished its subtle wit even more the second time.
There are some wonderful laugh-out-loud moments, such as when reynolds throws a tantrum at mention of the word ‘chic’, a ghastly import from across the Channel.
The film is impeccably observed throughout. Anderson is Californian through and through, and not yet 50, but he has an extraordinary eye and ear for posh, post-war Englishness. And Jonny Greenwood’s classical score, by turns jaunty, plaintive and intense, is exactly right.
Day-Lewis has obviously done his homework, too. reynolds’s voice, the way it lacks inflexion and emotion, is somehow like a distillation of the era. And he has certainly learned how to pin a hem. In fact, from the small battalion of stout, ageing seamstresses who arrive every morning at reynolds’s house, to the close-ups of needles and tape-measures, of silk and satin, the film is like a love-letter to old-fashioned couture.
I wouldn’t want to encroach on reynolds’s dead-mother fixation, but I wish my own late mother, an elegant woman who made her own clothes when times were hard during my childhood, had lived to see it.
Phantom Thread won’t delight everyone; it’s not what you’d call a crowd-pleaser. But for my money it deserves every plaudit it gets, and that also goes for Manville.
SHEmatches Day-Lewis step for step with an enthralling performance as Cyril, who watches over her brother with adoration, spiked with just a little revulsion. Manville has an Academy Award nomination, too. If he doesn’t win, I really hope she does.
ALSo in the running for an oscar is Denzel Washington, for his committed turn as the titular veteran attorney in
Roman J. Israel Esq., a shambling, shambolic man, but fiercely principled and with an incredible legal mind.
roman has worked for decades for the same small criminal defence practice in Los Angeles, but when a heart attack fells his partner, he finds himself reliant on the patronage of a slick, big- city lawyer (Colin Farrell) invited to save the business by subsuming it into his own.
roman J. Israel is written and directed by Dan Gilroy, whose last picture was 2014’s excellent Nightcrawler. That was the story of a man with no moral compass, whereas here, roman’s moral compass gleams with virtue. He doesn’t always know when to stop talking, but that seems like his only professional frailty — at least until he succumbs to a temptation that throws both him, and us, right off kilter.
It is as if, half-way through the movie, he has had a personality transplant. I didn’t believe in it. Nevertheless, Washington does a great job of suppressing any notion we might still have of him as an action hero. It’s a fine, often moving performance in a flawed, but thoroughly watchable, film.