Daniel Day-lewis’s final screen role is a perfect fit
Phantom Thread
15 cert, 130 min Dir Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring Daniel Day-lewis, Vicky Krieps, Lesley Manville, Camilla Rutherford, Harriet Sansom Harris, Brian Gleeson, Gina Mckee, Julia Davis
Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-lewis) turns numbers into figures. From lists of measurements obtained with nothing more than a keen eye and a thumb-worn tailor’s tape, he creates the type of silhouettes that make his customers look and feel like better versions of themselves. Reynolds is an internationally renowned couturier working in Fifties London, and that makes him a kind of gigolo with scissors. When a woman tries on a bespoke gown in his studio, it’s as if the garment itself has her clasped in a dance hold, ready to sweep her off her feet.
A little later, we watch him sizing up a model in a sheer slip, while his sister and lifelong assistant Cyril (Lesley Manville) jots down the particulars. “You have no breasts,” he coolly observes, stretching the tape. “I know, I’m sorry,” the girl replies, with a flinch. “No, no, you’re perfect,” he says. “It’s my job to give you some.” Then, after a pause: “If I choose to.”
Welcome to the prickly, sly, exquisite world of Phantom Thread – not just the new film from Paul Thomas Anderson, but perhaps also the last one Day-lewis will make. The three-time Oscarwinner announced his retirement from acting earlier this year, which made this collaboration with Anderson, with whom he had previously made There Will Be Blood, his final project. There’s no good reason to doubt it: Day-lewis’s retirement from the stage has held fast since 1989. And if it is, he could hardly have given a more ideal performance with which to sign off.
By that I don’t mean that Reynolds Woodcock is merely a great role: specifically, he’s a great last role, and in playing him Day-lewis does so much intricate unfastening of various psychological nooks and hatches, you feel as if you’re watching him dismantling the apparatus of his trade as he goes. Every line-reading and gesture exerts an almost supernatural grip. There is an early scene in which Reynolds orders breakfast in a seaside hotel, and it feels as freighted with significance as a Shakespearean soliloquy. Only Day-lewis can make you gasp at the words “and sausages”.
Of course, Reynolds isn’t merely ordering breakfast: his eye has been caught by the waitress, Alma (Vicky Krieps). What attracts him is something to do with the way she trips over the carpet, though Anderson leaves the specifics completely opaque: you and I don’t see the world as Reynolds does, and probably never could. Perhaps the phantom thread of the title is this invisible filament that twines the two of them together from this point on, forming a bond that seemingly can’t be unstitched.
Soon enough, Reynolds has whisked Alma to London, where she becomes his latest muse – she’s the young woman in the measuring scene above – at his townhouse atelier. Working as his own cinematographer for the first time since his 1988 short The Dirk Diggler Story – the basis for his breakthrough hit Boogie Nights
– Anderson shoots the House of Woodcock with reverence but also a wink, tracking down the hallway before gazing up the stairwell, while Reynolds’s army of middle-aged female assistants file to the second floor, where genius resides. As in Anderson’s previous three films, there is a virtuoso score by Jonny Greenwood.
The peace is so fragile, even a mistimed pot of tea can knock the mood askew, and Alma is nothing if not a destabilising force, standing her ground and answering back. The tug of dominance and submission between the two of them is thrillingly kinky and intense, particularly when the barbed and unflappable Cyril, played by Manville on the form of her life, is stirred into the mix. But it also bubbles with a strange comic energy, and the film is very funny in unexpected ways. In a Tati-style meta-jape, Anderson has cranked Alma’s sound effects, so that even an innocuous action like scratching burnt toast becomes a full-bore aural assault.
Just as the young former waitress holds her own against the fashion icon, so too does the relatively unknown Krieps against her world-famous co-star, bringing crackly spontaneity to Anderson’s sturdy, literary script.
Phantom Thread is built along the theoretically familiar lines of Gothic romance, but it’s very hard in the moment to work out how conventionally romantic Reynolds and Alma’s relationship actually is. To say any more would be saying too much, except that the arrangement the film eventually snakes its way around to will, I suspect, split Anderson’s audience, perhaps angrily, right down the middle. Some will think it a completely insane and brutally self-defeating compromise. Some will think it true love. And everyone, wonderfully, will be right.
Phantom Thread is released in UK cinemas on Friday February 2