I thought about The Servant quite a lot whilst watching Anderson’s latest this afternoon. Which tells you several things. One is that the film has its longeurs, which offer plenty of time for reflection, which may or may not be a good thing. Another is that the issue of the British class system is still alive and kicking and generating box office. It will be forever thus.
Phantom Thread, which I confess I had confused for a long time with the latest instalment of the Star Wars franchise, is a curate’s egg of a movie. I kept on thinking that there must have been something I was missing. Who was Alma? How come this young woman with a German accent had landed on the South Coast of Britain in the fifties? At one point in the film there’s a reference to a Dominican man selling visas to Jews in the war and the camera cuts to Alma’s face, and I thought, a-ha, there’s a meatier storyline which is about to unravel, but I was wrong, there isn’t. There’s plenty of unravelling and meaty mushrooms, but not much in the way of a storyline. It feels at times like this must be a slightly clumsy adaptation of a novel, with the above unfulfilled strands and random moments like the Swiss honeymoon which serve no real purpose. (It isn’t, as far as I know). At other points it seemed likely that this could be a highly personal project for Anderson, which is perhaps dedicated to his wife, a slightly self-indulgent way of explaining the insufferable nature of artistic genius, something PTA does indeed possess, but which it might have been cheaper and more useful to explore in therapy. Finally, earlier in the film, I thought it might be making a timely commentary on the way in which women are used (in movies and in life) as decorative adornments, and that Alma’s story would challenge that seemingly irresistible trend. But Phantom Thread didn’t really do that either; the marriage of Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps is a hardly a great leap forward for the feminist cause, especially when she has to poison her husband in order to obtain parity within their marriage.
All of which suggests a film containing a fragrant bouquet of ideas, but not that much staying power, either in the development of these ideas or the trama of the plot. In the end, the film seems to trip over itself in a bid to get to the end, hammering home the point about the sub-S&M relationship through the recycling of its slightly clunky poison mushroom trope. At the same time, there are some great moments and some great scenes. Day-Lewis is an actor with tremendous cerebral vigour, which he’s never afraid to employ. At times it feels as though his Reynolds Woodcock is an Irons/ Nighy pastiche, the distracted posh Brit per excellence, but then he puts his foot on the gas and produces moments of spectacular, excruciating insight, where the monstrous nature of the man he plays is stripped bare. No-one wrinkles an eyebrow quite like Day-Lewis.
These moments threaten to carry the film, but they don’t quite. To return to The Servant: the Pinter/ Losey film explored the class/ power dynamic far more surgically, aided not just by the performances of Fox and Bogarde, but also by the concision of Pinter’s script. The neat topsy-turvy nature of their relationship was always kept in check by the writing, maintaining the tension and the feeling that something was as stake, something Phantom Thread allows to slip in the last half hour. Perhaps Anderson is trying to do too much, or perhaps he was never entirely sure what he was trying to do. Or perhaps, as mooted, there’s actually a subtext to the story which has very little to do with the viewer, and everything to do with the artist’s struggle. The artist in this case being Paul Thomas Anderson, rather than Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock.
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