Among Paul Thomas Anderson’s previous films, I have only seen There Will Be Blood, which I found turgid and tendentious. It’s the kind of arthouse epic that the word “grandiloquent” is reserved for. Phantom Thread comprises such a vast leap in artistic creation that I struggle to recall the earlier work; it’s totally eclipsed.
Those interested in arthouse releases or the Oscars will already know the context of the story, and the cultural reverberations of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance at its centre. He plays a fictitious renowned couturier, named Reynolds Woodcock, in London in the 1950s. His milieu is the highest society of Europe: his fashion is wrought for the aristocracy and royalty who admire the beauty of his work, or, rather, the great light in which it casts them. He is obsessive and controlling by nature, which brings about the exquisite creations of his art, a demanding work environment for those employed by House of Woodcock, and fraught tensions in any personal relationships. The work environment is efficiently run (and his personal relationships coldly smoothed over) by his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), who is unmarried and who systematically manages Reynolds’s fashion house and his life.
Women are a part of that life and of the world that Reynolds insists on subjecting to his control (supposedly men would be, too, if he ever deigned to speak to one, other than his unnamed financial manager). All his employees are women (which is not unusual for the time or the setting), even all his clients are women, and he seems to have a constant need for a muse and her romantic satisfaction. The first shown in the film is Johanna (Camilla Rutherford), whom Cyril neatly cuts loose when her presence and emotional needs become a burden to Reynolds. He, meanwhile, isn’t even in town for the unceremonious break-up, but resting in the countryside, where he quickly meets a young immigrant waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps), entices her to his large country house and workshop, and begins work on a dress inspired by his sheer vision of her bodily form.
Alma stays on with Reynolds, returning with him to London to work at the House of Woodcock and live in his home, providing similar inspiration and romantic gratifications as previous paramours had. But her manner is firm and her spirit decisive, her devotion resolute and her intentions unswerving. She does a lot in service of the House of Woodcock and provides inordinate personal affection and satisfaction to Reynolds, which does not go unrequited. She even finds favour with the stiff-necked Cyril. But when the situation loses its surplus of gratification over effort for Reynolds, as any long-term living arrangement must, and seems inevitable with Alma, who often resists Reynolds’s unyielding grip, she refuses to be cast aside. The details of the plot are too delectably surprising and even shocking to spoil — though they unfold at a deliberate pace and without the flashing revelation of conventional twists — but Alma devises a way to stay on the inside and advance in her relationship with Reynolds. In effect, she increases his dependence on her and sharply enhances his awareness of that dependence. She makes real and immediate for him what is often abstract and distant in our minds: the terrors and enormities of life, and the way in which the contest with another person and with the deep quasi-mythic reverberations of one’s mind subsume the simpler gratifications of life, in their cataclysm and their ecstasy.
To read something allegorically is to read it ironically, and I don’t think that that’s the appropriate way to approach Phantom Thread. It’s not quite a metaphor for artistic creation and its surrounding struggles, but a resounding evocation of them. Anderson’s filmmaking inheres the story with a high transfigurative power, in which the step-by-step processes of making art and of fulfilling technical craft — mirrored in the processes of seduction, romantic fulfillment, and deeper relationship-forging with Alma — are elevated deliriously to a higher spiritual dimension. Phantom Thread doesn’t only illustrate but lives out Anderson’s ideas of the tight bonds between life and art. Reynolds is not only emotionally invested in the works he creates, but is existentially bound to them. In a spiritual sense, his life depends on the beauty of his art and the success of realising his creative vision. The self-absorbed antics of a high-profile client while wearing his gown is not only an affront to his sensibility, but to his very identity and sense of being. Anderson suggests, as I have long posited, that, for a true artist, life and art are inextricably joined. He could never hope to separate the two. His work, his style, his methods of creation and the ultimate results are all unstoppable outpourings; they’re the outward effects of a soul that can’t be contained.
This connection is not only in that the content of the work derives from the matter or experiences of one’s life (which was an illuminatingly clear aspect of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird), but that the artist’s very personality infuses the work and brings it to life (which is what made Lady Bird beautiful, as opposed to merely remarkable). Style is not a series of postures, nor a scheme of formal signifiers devised to tell a story, nor the choice of a visual sense meant to heighten mood or allure; it’s the very expression of inner tensions, conflicts, intimations, intimacies, and immensities; and it’s not a choice for an artist beset with these qualities. Style emerges naturally from an artist’s life, just as the creative drive cannot be resisted. The applicability of this fact to the work of Day-Lewis is obvious, since the most widely reported aspect of any film he works on is how thoroughly he integrates each role with his day-to-day living. (For most other actors, the connection is implicit, and not visible, yet no less real.) It was no surprise to me to hear that he wishes to retire; I can hardly imagine the heavy psychic toll taken on him throughout his career. Yet it’s just as applicable, and thrillingly so, to this work by Anderson: his tale of existential danger and intensity is filmed and presented with similar danger and intensity. He looks in a much better emotional state in real life than his character Reynolds does in the film, but the perilous interconnection with his art is in evidence on the screen. I don’t mean that he’s dependent on Phantom Thread’s critical or commercial success, but that his own identity is linked to what he can create and the degree of beauty with which he realises it.
But Phantom Thread is about love even more than it’s about art, and, for all the fuss that’s been made (rightly, in my judgement) about Day-Lewis’s transfixing performance, Krieps’s is as much a leading role as his. Perhaps the substance of the love story that I can invoke here is less than that of the ideas of artistic creation, but maybe that’s just for people like me, who spend more time blogging about art than about love. Yet the very matter of the film, the fabric that Anderson stitches and weaves to make the film, is formed from the matter of romance, of erotic passions — the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual forces of connection — between two exceptional and ardent people, one of whom is an artist. The lover is not merely a lover of his body and soul, but of his art, and finds as much sustenance in its beauty, and in the parts of him that exist in it, as he finds inspiration in her presence. Perhaps the love story — which ends on a daringly original and astonishingly unique note of fury, hope, pathos, ecstasy, peril, uncertainty, tenderness, and tranquility — would be doomed if Alma were insensible to the stuff of Reynolds’s creations. The artist may be more dependent on a companion than he realises, and in more life-altering and life-threatening ways than he realises, but a lover cannot hope to be of abiding value in the artist’s life if their own sensibility is not one of beauty and their personality is not one of individual and original being. There’s no choice in art: Your touch imparts the artistic values of distinctiveness of beauty, or it does not, and you cannot control it. But nor is there a choice in love: Your character and presence are sufficient to the task and apt for the challenges and requirements of your companion, or they are not. Life requires a largeness, an overflowing in both, and from that excess comes sublimity.
Those interested in arthouse releases or the Oscars will already know the context of the story, and the cultural reverberations of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance at its centre. He plays a fictitious renowned couturier, named Reynolds Woodcock, in London in the 1950s. His milieu is the highest society of Europe: his fashion is wrought for the aristocracy and royalty who admire the beauty of his work, or, rather, the great light in which it casts them. He is obsessive and controlling by nature, which brings about the exquisite creations of his art, a demanding work environment for those employed by House of Woodcock, and fraught tensions in any personal relationships. The work environment is efficiently run (and his personal relationships coldly smoothed over) by his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), who is unmarried and who systematically manages Reynolds’s fashion house and his life.
Women are a part of that life and of the world that Reynolds insists on subjecting to his control (supposedly men would be, too, if he ever deigned to speak to one, other than his unnamed financial manager). All his employees are women (which is not unusual for the time or the setting), even all his clients are women, and he seems to have a constant need for a muse and her romantic satisfaction. The first shown in the film is Johanna (Camilla Rutherford), whom Cyril neatly cuts loose when her presence and emotional needs become a burden to Reynolds. He, meanwhile, isn’t even in town for the unceremonious break-up, but resting in the countryside, where he quickly meets a young immigrant waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps), entices her to his large country house and workshop, and begins work on a dress inspired by his sheer vision of her bodily form.
Alma stays on with Reynolds, returning with him to London to work at the House of Woodcock and live in his home, providing similar inspiration and romantic gratifications as previous paramours had. But her manner is firm and her spirit decisive, her devotion resolute and her intentions unswerving. She does a lot in service of the House of Woodcock and provides inordinate personal affection and satisfaction to Reynolds, which does not go unrequited. She even finds favour with the stiff-necked Cyril. But when the situation loses its surplus of gratification over effort for Reynolds, as any long-term living arrangement must, and seems inevitable with Alma, who often resists Reynolds’s unyielding grip, she refuses to be cast aside. The details of the plot are too delectably surprising and even shocking to spoil — though they unfold at a deliberate pace and without the flashing revelation of conventional twists — but Alma devises a way to stay on the inside and advance in her relationship with Reynolds. In effect, she increases his dependence on her and sharply enhances his awareness of that dependence. She makes real and immediate for him what is often abstract and distant in our minds: the terrors and enormities of life, and the way in which the contest with another person and with the deep quasi-mythic reverberations of one’s mind subsume the simpler gratifications of life, in their cataclysm and their ecstasy.
To read something allegorically is to read it ironically, and I don’t think that that’s the appropriate way to approach Phantom Thread. It’s not quite a metaphor for artistic creation and its surrounding struggles, but a resounding evocation of them. Anderson’s filmmaking inheres the story with a high transfigurative power, in which the step-by-step processes of making art and of fulfilling technical craft — mirrored in the processes of seduction, romantic fulfillment, and deeper relationship-forging with Alma — are elevated deliriously to a higher spiritual dimension. Phantom Thread doesn’t only illustrate but lives out Anderson’s ideas of the tight bonds between life and art. Reynolds is not only emotionally invested in the works he creates, but is existentially bound to them. In a spiritual sense, his life depends on the beauty of his art and the success of realising his creative vision. The self-absorbed antics of a high-profile client while wearing his gown is not only an affront to his sensibility, but to his very identity and sense of being. Anderson suggests, as I have long posited, that, for a true artist, life and art are inextricably joined. He could never hope to separate the two. His work, his style, his methods of creation and the ultimate results are all unstoppable outpourings; they’re the outward effects of a soul that can’t be contained.
This connection is not only in that the content of the work derives from the matter or experiences of one’s life (which was an illuminatingly clear aspect of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird), but that the artist’s very personality infuses the work and brings it to life (which is what made Lady Bird beautiful, as opposed to merely remarkable). Style is not a series of postures, nor a scheme of formal signifiers devised to tell a story, nor the choice of a visual sense meant to heighten mood or allure; it’s the very expression of inner tensions, conflicts, intimations, intimacies, and immensities; and it’s not a choice for an artist beset with these qualities. Style emerges naturally from an artist’s life, just as the creative drive cannot be resisted. The applicability of this fact to the work of Day-Lewis is obvious, since the most widely reported aspect of any film he works on is how thoroughly he integrates each role with his day-to-day living. (For most other actors, the connection is implicit, and not visible, yet no less real.) It was no surprise to me to hear that he wishes to retire; I can hardly imagine the heavy psychic toll taken on him throughout his career. Yet it’s just as applicable, and thrillingly so, to this work by Anderson: his tale of existential danger and intensity is filmed and presented with similar danger and intensity. He looks in a much better emotional state in real life than his character Reynolds does in the film, but the perilous interconnection with his art is in evidence on the screen. I don’t mean that he’s dependent on Phantom Thread’s critical or commercial success, but that his own identity is linked to what he can create and the degree of beauty with which he realises it.
But Phantom Thread is about love even more than it’s about art, and, for all the fuss that’s been made (rightly, in my judgement) about Day-Lewis’s transfixing performance, Krieps’s is as much a leading role as his. Perhaps the substance of the love story that I can invoke here is less than that of the ideas of artistic creation, but maybe that’s just for people like me, who spend more time blogging about art than about love. Yet the very matter of the film, the fabric that Anderson stitches and weaves to make the film, is formed from the matter of romance, of erotic passions — the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual forces of connection — between two exceptional and ardent people, one of whom is an artist. The lover is not merely a lover of his body and soul, but of his art, and finds as much sustenance in its beauty, and in the parts of him that exist in it, as he finds inspiration in her presence. Perhaps the love story — which ends on a daringly original and astonishingly unique note of fury, hope, pathos, ecstasy, peril, uncertainty, tenderness, and tranquility — would be doomed if Alma were insensible to the stuff of Reynolds’s creations. The artist may be more dependent on a companion than he realises, and in more life-altering and life-threatening ways than he realises, but a lover cannot hope to be of abiding value in the artist’s life if their own sensibility is not one of beauty and their personality is not one of individual and original being. There’s no choice in art: Your touch imparts the artistic values of distinctiveness of beauty, or it does not, and you cannot control it. But nor is there a choice in love: Your character and presence are sufficient to the task and apt for the challenges and requirements of your companion, or they are not. Life requires a largeness, an overflowing in both, and from that excess comes sublimity.
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