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Phantom Thread is the rare art film that you’ve absolutely seen meme’d. It’s the point where the Venn diagrams of film bro enthusiasts, serious critics, and self-aware shitposters on Twitter and Tumblr convened to have a lot of fun with one of the most moody, particular, intricately put together movies of 2018. It’s a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, which means it’s the subject of cult-like adoration, but as it prepares to make its television debut, it’s probably worth checking the temperature on what those cultists were freaking out over.
Every Paul Thomas Anderson movie tends to get at least a little bit overrated; most of them shake out as good-to-excellent movies, of course, just maybe not the godlike creations that they were initially accepted as. Phantom Thread took awards season 2017 by storm, with a movie that wasn’t just PT Anderson noodling on about a mercurial, irritable aesthetic genius, but that genius — fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock — is played by can’t-miss greatest actor of his generation Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis not only got the Oscar nomination everybody assumed he would, but the big surprise of nomination morning was that Anderson got nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, supporting actress Lesley Manville was recognized for playing Woodcock’s formidable sister, and the whole endeavor won the award for Best Costumes.
Residing outside the sphere of the cult of Paul Thomas Anderson is always the least fun place to be, especially when the director has a new movie out, and this was especially true during the Phantom Thread release, when memes about “hungry boy” Reynolds Woodcock and his muse (and oftentime source of his frustration) Alma, played by Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps. Their relationship is both passionate and arch in a way that really lent itself to things like inside jokes and memes. Theirs was one of the great fractured love stories of 2018 in film, if we’re being honest.
And yet it’s hard not to see that same archness of tone in the fans of the film, who seem to lionize Woodcock and his temperamental selfishness in a way that few other movie characters could get away with. Add to that the fact that Anderson made an apology for the auteur as temperamental genius in a way that feints towards taking him down a peg but in a way that never once stops worshipping him. There’s a particular sequence where a local society woman, played by stage and screen veteran Harriet Harris, uses her money and her longstanding professional fondness for Woodcock to get a one-of-a-kind dress made for a fancy party, only to — for lack of any better term — defile the dress with her drunken boorishness. It’s one of the more pitiless sequences I’ve seen in a movie in quite some time, as Woodcock and Alma set their sniping aside and, Batman-and-Robin-like, team up to strip the only thing of value (the dress) from this red-faced, ugly, sloppy wretch of a woman, with the audience left to do little more than laugh. It’s a shockingly smug scene filmed, as all of Anderson’s scenes are, with impeccable precision.
It’s funny to contrast Phantom Thread and it’s critical and popular (at least insomuch as it’s popular among movie obsessives) success to mother! which was famously hated by audiences and then dragged through the mud by many critics for being … an apology for the auteur as temperamental genius. And yet mother far more audaciously calls out its artist character for being irredeemably selfish (and then brings the entire world down around him) before leaving the audience helpless to watch him begin again. Phantom Threads ends pretty audaciously too, though in a way that lets the audience take comfort in a little bit of comeuppance.
Ultimately, yes, Phantom Thread holds up as one of the most curiously crowd-pleasing movies of this century. As a possible Daniel Day-Lewis swan song, it will always be remembered fondly. But time will tell if the rabid enthusiasm for Woodcock/Alma ephemera will give way to an acknowledgement of the films more smug qualities.
