Story of a marriage weaves romance, weird plot twists
The delectable peculiarities of “Phantom Thread” come from all over, from countless inspirations. Some are cinematic: Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 gothic standard “Rebecca,” for one, and David Lean’s little-known and fascinating 1949 romantic triangle “The Passionate Friends,” for another.
Other inspirations are personal, presumably, since a movie this distinctive in its delicate perversity is likely saying something about the preoccupations and ambitions of its writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson, and its star, Daniel Day-Lewis.
The setting of “Phantom Thread” is the highfashion world of 1950s London. Anderson treats his subject, and his shapeshifting story, to a series of luxe, swank images. The protagonist, Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock, exerts every ounce of taste, focus and control he can muster to create gowns for a rarefied clientele of royalty and lesser mortals. Business is slipping; the House of Woodcock has its more modish competitors.
But Reynolds, whose mother issues lurk in the shadows, devotes his life to his work, carving out room only for his business partner sister, Cyril, played with sly authority by Lesley Manville, with an air of “Rebecca” and Mrs. Danvers about her.
Alone, traveling to his cottage in the country, Reynolds meets a waitress at a seaside inn. She is Alma, of uncertain extraction. The actress who plays her, Vicky Krieps, is from Luxembourg, and she is excellent, at once emotionally open and a master concealer when the central relationship in the film demands it.
As Alma and Reynolds come to know each other, it’s a chaste depiction of love between strangely matched equals. Alma appreciates the finery she’s a part of, but does Reynolds see her as anything more than a clothes rack with a beating heart? Probably, but one of the triumphs of “Phantom Thread” lies in Day-Lewis’ witty dissection of an aesthete who cannot abide the sound of his wife eating cereal in the morning.
Where this marriage goes, and what Alma does to course-correct her spouse’s less attractive traits, takes “Phantom Thread” into unexpected territory. Parts of the film, played up in the trailer, suggest an intoxicating, windswept romance laden with secrets; other parts go for wild tonal changeups, on par with the raucous black-comic coda of “There Will Be Blood” (2007), Anderson’s previous collaboration with Day-Lewis. The movie feels both expansive and confining, depending on the story chapter. Anderson’s visual facility by now has become so intuitive, so fluid and effortlessly right, that if you’re at all susceptible to the allure of a moving camera, you’ll fall headlong into “Phantom Thread.”
The production design by Mark Tildesley, Mark Bridges’ costumes, the cinematography (uncredited; Anderson worked with several people): All these elements cohere into a beauty of a picture that grows weirder and more compelling as it goes.
It must be said, I suppose: Where “Phantom Thread” dares to tread may exasperate anyone looking for a disposable exercise in movie nostalgia. When Alma feels her happiness slipping away, her solution is at once alarming and effective. I’d characterize Anderson’s film as a romantic comedy with an unusually complicated and profoundly destabilizing happy ending. If that sounds like your thing, then here you are.