Look, I've considered myself in the past a Paul Thomas Anderson fan. I love Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and I consider There Will Be Blood to be his shining achievement in filmmaking. I can stand Punch Drunk Love (though I believe it has many story flaws). However, his last few films have been duds. I'm talking, of course about the seriously dull The Master and the complete misfire that was Inherent Vice (I still blame him for making Katherine Waterston a thing). When I heard DDL was reuniting with PTA for one final film, I was praying for a reunion that could even just stand in the shadow of There Will Be Blood; however, PTA has never been a conventional director. And while Phantom Thread certainly FEELS like a PTA movie... I'm not entirely sure why in the hell it even exits in the first place.
It's the story of a couple of assholes who get together to become an embittered asshole couple in order to do asshole things and live happily ever asshole after. DDL is Reynolds Woodcock, a respected dressmaker. He lives in a house with dozens of people (who either wait on him or help him sew his dresses). He's got very obvious mommy issues, has never married and is a bit of an obsessive, elitist codger. Oh, and also he probably wants to bang his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), a frigid wildebeest of a woman who gets off on her salty verbal sparring with others. Oh, and she DEFINITELY wants to bang her brother. He meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), a younger plain-Jane type who he instantly falls for because she doesn't swoon over him like most women do. When he's an asshole, she's an asshole back and there becomes some sort of weird mutual asshole respect between the two of them. She winds up moving into the house and drawing immediate disdain from Cyril. Reynolds is an asshole to her, she constantly looks like she's miserable, she winds up trying to poison Reynolds... yet... she's very much in love with him. Reynolds on the other hand, has little in common with Alma and is constantly annoyed with her girl-ish actions, yet somehow needs her around. Alma, who is constantly belittled and torn down by Reynolds, gives us zero reason as to why she's sticking around or why she even cares about this dude. By the time we get to her poisoning him (which is over an hour into the movie) it makes little sense to her character and now, as an audience member, we can't decide who is a worse person.
I will give PTA this-- the writing, especially the dialogue, is top notch. There are some verbal jabs in there that made me wanna stand up with a microphone and just yell "aaaahhhhh shit, son!" The lighting, the costumes, the cinematography was all excellent. PTA knows how to direct the hell out of a movie, but his stories just get a little convoluted and masturbatory for the sake of being convoluted and masturbatory. This goes without saying, but the acting was fantastic. DDL is such a sensational actor, it's hard not to think about that this could possibly be the last time we see him on the big screen and how really sad that actually is. Vicky Krieps should certainly get a lot of the credit for the film. It's not easy acting side-by-side with a legend, especially portraying his love interest and that character supposedly trying to be "stronger" than he is. That takes chops... and she's got 'em. But everything else was just so, for lack of a better term, "out there" that it was hard to take seriously. The ending is so unbelievable and into outer space that the theater I was in erupted into [unintentional] laughter at it all. I understand the story is supposed to be about breaking obsession and the attempts at breaking self-destruction, but it was presented in a way that it was almost a parody of these things instead of an indictment of them. Maybe I'm missing the point, but when looking at the story as a whole, there isn't much of a case as to why this story even exists. Even from the start of their coupling, I didn't buy Reynolds and Alma as a thing. Their first date is almost creepy and most of her smiles seem counterfeit. So, I'm not sure why I'm even supposed to buy the preposterous (and artsy as f**k!) ending.
I may have actually had the weirdest experience seeing this movie (and I'm not even talking about the fact that a dog barked three times from somewhere in the theater). I'm talking about how I thought the movie was going to be dull and boring (which it certainly isn't), but I ended up sitting there somewhat enjoying what I was watching (even though I was questioning nearly all of the writing choices). I was mesmerized by it all. The flow of the film, the music, the way it has a soothing feeling to it and how glued I was to every aspect of it-- yet, by the end of it I was thinking back about how nothing really fell together to make a cohesive unit. It's not as Paul Thomas Anderson-y as The Master or Inherent Vice, but it doesn't hold an ass basket to There Will Be Blood. And it does seem like quite a shame that this is assumedly the final DDL movie we get to witness. Because we deserve better and so does he.
C
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