Nominated for six Oscars, PHANTOM THREAD is an exquisite achievement of narrative power, visual splendour and aural perfection, redolent of the best of Hollywood’s golden years.
Nominated for Best Picture of the Year, PHANTOM THREAD is the sum total of its awesome collaborative parts.
Paul Thomas Anderson has been nominated as Best Director and fittingly so. I dare say he should also have been nominated for Best Screenplay as the elegant, erudite and eloquent script is the brilliant bedrock of the film.
Daniel Day Lewis has been nominated for Best Actor in a Lead Role for his performance as Reynolds Woodcock, a renowned dressmaker. It is a seamless performance of a tightly stitched character, nuanced, delicate, robust, fastidiously finessed. Should he win, it will be his fourth Oscar, and a fitting finale to a stellar career.
Playing his sister Cyril, Lesley Manville has been nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, her first Oscar nomination in a career of high calibre. As the sibling sentry at the gates of her brother’s genius, she is a formidable force, protective of his foibles, concepts and conceits. His beloved “old sew and sew”.
Set in the glamour of 1950’s post-war London, a crucial factor in bringing PHANTOM THREAD to the screen lay in the creation of the costumes, requiring an authenticity and sophistication on the level of London couturiers of the era like Hardy Amies. Anderson wasn’t interested in borrowing or renting vintage apparel from museums or costume houses. For frequent Anderson collaborator Mark Bridges (Inherent Vice, The Master, There Will Be Blood), creating costumes from scratch was the only solution for a story in which dressmaking is central. And his work has garnered an Oscar nomination, his third. Bridges won the award for The Artist.
The sextet of nominations is rounded by Jonny Greenwood‘s elegant and evocative score.
The glaring omission is Vicky Krieps, the film’s catalyst, Alma, the young, strong-willed woman who soon becomes a fixture in Reynolds Woodcock’s life as his muse and lover. Once controlled and planned, Woodcock finds his carefully tailored life disrupted by this beautifully beguiling woman.
Women come and go through Woodcock’s life, providing the confirmed bachelor with inspiration and companionship, until he comes across Alma, creating a stitch in time, a phantom thread that seismically shifts his whole world.
Vicky Krieps is utterly intoxicating in her role, making complete sense of Woodcock’s infatuation.Her chemistry with Day-Lewis is acting alchemy, a stunning symbiosis, a complete consummation, committed and confirmed.
Their initial meeting is a scene of swooning seduction, simple and direct, courtly and carnal. Has wooing with a food order been more romantic?
With its evocative postwar London setting and picturesque escapes to the British countryside, PHANTOM THREAD is steeped in romantic atmosphere with a delicious dash of the Gothic. A subversive dark comedy and instant classic, PHANTOM THREAD features incredible performances, beautiful dresses, drunken heiresses, overbearing ghosts, and the delirious dream state that the best films elicit.
Is it possible to like it more? Repeated viewings, I’m sure, will make it so. PHANTOM THREAD official site.