![]() ![]() She knows him, sees down deep to those indescribable intricacies that fundamentally define him, and she changes him. Maybe he needs someone to hurt him and heal him. A man so complicated, so broken, may want a simple, unalloyed partner, use her like a corporeal piece of decorum, but what he needs, Anderson implies, may be someone who instigates him-someone who challenges his ideas and impetus. She gives every piece of herself over to the mercurial Reynolds he tries to rearrange them to construct the partner he wants, turn her into a paradigm of acquiescence and domesticity. Alma permeates Reynolds’s heart and Home, leaving her fingerprints on the fog. It requires compromise and sacrifice and malleability to remain sustainable. Love is, at its essence, an ineffable connection, a sensation of inexplicable, unexplainable attraction and desire, a series of moments strung together to form a sinuous narrative. Unspoken and unwanted urges, misunderstood needs-they imbue the film like a fine mist. If dreams sometimes represent repressed desires, then the dreamy atmosphere of Phantom Thread is permeated by them. Showing off one of Reynolds’s dresses, Alma dances with Sylph-like grace through the house, before an audience, as Reynolds watches through a peephole. Reynolds and Alma are products engendered by their surroundings, and the world, it seems, has been hewn and sewn by a great seamstress. White streamers of light pour through windows, casting a halo around Alma engirdled by light and bedecked with an ornate garnet dress, Alma has the air of an angel-an angel of death, according to an irate Reynolds. The sky has the texture and haze of sunlight filtered through a white garment, the grain giving the illusion of ripples in the air. While no Director of Photography is credited, Anderson purportedly took on duties himself, overseeing a coterie of grips and gaffers. Here, he has a touch as light as gossamer.Īnderson is a resolutely stylish filmmaker, and here, in a film about a man whose vocation is style, he finds, for perhaps the first time, beauty in restraint. Anderson is sometimes hindered by his penchant for grandiose WTF moments (“I drink your milkshake!”), which, while meme-worthy, work in opposition the film’s trajectory and tone. Though they don’t act or talk like real people (the film adheres to a weird but consistent internal logic), Reynolds and Alma are the most human characters of Anderson’s career because they have palpable feelings, flaws to overcome or accept. The flawed, yearning, damaged humans in Phantom Thread are a departure for Anderson. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the surreal nature of such characters keeps the viewer at a distance, and turns a film into an intellectual endeavor. ![]() Even Punch-Drunk Love, the director’s Altman-inspired mutation of a romcom, is about a bundle of quirks and eccentricities (played with affable volatility by Adam Sandler) that in no way resembles a human being. Think of Day-Lewis’s barn-burning performance as Daniel Plainview, a personification of unbridled capitalism who seemingly has crude oil coursing his veins, in There Will Be Blood, or Joaquin Phoenix’s erupting id Freddie Quell in The Master. ![]() Since 2002, Anderson’s characters are often ideas manifest as anthropomorphic entities rather than actual people. Watching Reynolds burn up in bed brings to mind a James Salter quote: “Love, that furnace into which everything is dropped.” Illness is their aphrodisiac, intellectual conflict their sex. Jaundiced, lying in a pool of sweat, he finally gives himself to her. The intimacy and fervor of their love is most obvious after Alma puts poison mushroom shavings into Reynolds’s tea, rendering him frail and pathetic so that he must now rely on her. But mostly, the relationship, and the film, are both disturbingly romantic and notably sexless there’s some brief kissing, but nothing carnal occurs on screen, nor is anything salacious insinuated. Accompanying their romantic traipses is Jonny Greenwood’s pervasive score, seasick swoony, as if it drifted into the House of Woodcock. ![]() The wind throws around Reynolds’s hair, Alma’s dress. “Whatever you do,” she intones, “do it carefully.” Brumes of mist dance over the ocean. They have moments of affability, ambling hand-in-hand along the sinuous shorelines, walking along the tops of the cliffs. Theirs is an honest toxic relationship, one that actually works for them (probably to the chagrin of any therapists who watch it). Reynolds’s manipulation of Alma, and her oscillating attempts to appease and alter him, to be the partner he demands and to make him the partner she wants, are not mendacious or secretive, but open. Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread is an achingly beauteous and painful portrait of a complicated, codependent relationship, in which love is a necessary poison, the antidote to which is, literally, more poison. ![]()
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