THIS WAS THE GOODS
I've liked/loved most of PTA's movies. There Will Be Blood and The Master are the two peaks for me. I was really disappointed with Inherent Vice, especially since the book is great and it would seem a match made in heaven with PTA, but that film just did not work on any level for me.
This movie? This movie works. Like gangbusters. So much delightful tension (I haven't had this much fun watching dinner table chats since Hans Landa), so much film craft, a trio of great performances, a positively out of this world AMAZING score from Jonny Greenwood. I mean, it is without question, the best score of the year and probably my favorite since Zimmer's Interstellar score. Movie soundtrack nuts, go watch this movie and buy the soundtrack and eat your hearts out. Then point and laugh at all the other recent scores out there.
PTA/Bauman's/camera operator/whoever's approach to the cinematography is a delight. Damn do I miss film. The 35mm here--the textures, the contrast, just the tactility and depth of the image. Again this is a very soft-focus, blanket-lighting film for the most part, but it is absolute eye candy for a lover of film. I don't think it eclipses work like There Will Be Blood or The Master, but it has its own thing going and it's a joy to take in.
This does very much feel like a Merchant Ivory production that kind of slowly slides into a dark, weird, PTA-ish place. Aesthetically, while it is different from PTA's other movies, it always feels like a PTA movie. It has a very idiosyncratic approach to editing and rhythm that reminded me the most of Punch-Drunk Love, and the subject matter falls in line with that film, too. Love is insanity. Horrible, painful, life-saving insanity.
There are so many moments in this film that show PTA working on a different level from many of his peers. Unlike, say, Inherent Vice, the film has very clear thematic concerns and is pointed in how it develops and delivers on those, but its details, connected tangents, and the approach PTA takes to certain scenes go well beyond those concerns to deliver something entirely more nuanced, expansive (and yet very intimate in practical scope), and mysterious. This is an area that separates him from some other current American auteurs, like Aronofsky. While their backstories are barely sketched in (and in the case of Alma, non-existent) these characters feel like complex, broken, inscrutable people and watching the narrative swing them by its few threads around each other only to create a messy tangle because they're fighting their fates so well... it's a real pleasure, and a refreshing change from how most filmmakers approach a character-based story.
I don't want to give it away, but there is a moment where Woodcock has a vision from his bed and it sent cold chills right through me and I started to cry a bit, not even knowing why, really. You can feel how deeply PTA feels this movie. You can see him weaving together life, death, love, art, the search for control, to own one's own time, to sacrifice that time for another, to let your life mean something different to you than what it has meant all along, to feel that the dead are still with us and then to believe that you must in turn be with the living. So that if you die you are still present, because you were present, because you mattered to someone, and because they mattered to you. And so you tell a story. You make a dress. You film a film. And all of that is about the same thing. Trying to let yourself be known, and failing. Sewing secrets in the hems, that others will never see. You will always be a mystery, and so will they. But you can love each other, all the same.
Phantom Thread has the unique quality of being simultaneously straightforward and enigmatic, sweet and sinister, resonant and obscure. It's also terrifically funny (sometimes through nothing more than wonderful sound design and mixing) and painfully unfunny because it is so real and raw in moments where you almost want to look away, that's how much DDL and Krieps bare their characters to each other (yet never physically naked). To me it's easily one of the best films of the year, right up there with Columbus and Dunkirk.
squeeknessI'm a poor lost puppy
SwordOfMorningSuper Moderator
