musings on culture
“What has this man from Illinois created–I ask myself, closing the pages of his book–that his episodes of the conquest of another planet fill me with such terror and solitude?”
~ Jorge Luis Borges on Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles
“An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence. The boys can say anything, their scenes are almost tiresomely neat, they have all the facts and all the answers, but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray.”
~ Raymond Chandler, in a letter to Charles W. Morton, dated January 5, 1957
Mission: Impossible – Fallout marks the first time a Mission: Impossible director has returned to direct a follow-up installment, though writer/director Christopher McQuarrie has been a major contributor to this series as far back as Ghost Protocol, on which he served as writer. Recognizing that this film series was originally intended to function as a kind of director showcase, McQuarrie decided to vary his stylistic approach for Fallout. While the preceding two entries were characterized by a kind of bouncy energy, for Fallout, McQuarrie has decided to borrow the aesthetic of Christopher Nolan’s blockbusters.
McQuarrie is a better craftsman on a nuts-and-bolts level than Nolan; McQuarrie’s action sequences have a clarity and meticulousness that has always eluded the latter. Still, Fallout so often lacks the vividness and force of an actual Nolan blockbuster. The script and production design and cinematography and score blatantly evoke the work of Nolan’s collaborators–there are too many nods to the Nolan Batman films to count, including a League of Shadows-y cabal of villains calling themselves “The Apostles,” and a climax set in the icy mountains of Asia that recalls the icy vistas of Batman Begins–without capturing its force and scope, often reducing sequences to a pervasive brownish-grayishness backed by a numbing score. There’s still a sense of proper spectacle here (among other things, Fallout makes better use of prominent world landmarks than any of the recent Bond films), but the imitation-Nolan lacquer deadens the material.
Indeed, the textures and structures of Nolan’s films, messy and frustrating though they often are, extend from conviction. Nolan constructs grandiose, blunt-force expressions of his own secular mysticism, for which humanity’s transcendence (or failure to attain it) is always the greatest concern. The only transcendence with which Fallout is concerned is the transcendence of Tom Cruise.
The series has always been, to one extent or another, about Cruise himself, but it was only two films prior, on Ghost Protocol, that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt character truly found his groove. There, Hunt was formed into a charismatic cipher, a monastic hero driven by sheer will and determination. It’s an effective angle, but it offers little room for development; its sequel, Rogue Nation, didn’t really develop the idea as much as it forcefully reiterated it. Fallout does the same, but misguidedly tries to mine Hunt’s internal life for drama, punctuating the film with Hunt’s bland nightmares and monotonous speeches about why Hunt does what he does. Hunt is a thin avatar, and the character can’t (and shouldn’t be forced to) sustain this kind of inquiry. His headspace will never be as interesting as his feats of strength.
Those feats are certainly impressive, and Fallout‘s most satisfying, focused stretch begins with an all-timer: a breathtaking HALO jump that one-ups the memorable aerial sequence from Moonraker. From there, the film settles into a tense groove, becoming, for the next few scenes, a vicious and taut thriller that echoes the John Wick films while surpassing them in lushness and narrative intrigue. It’s no coincidence that this satisfying stretch of the film foregrounds Henry Cavill and Vanessa Kirby, both of whom have much more vivid and compelling relationships with Cruise’s Hunt than any of the series’ returning ensemble.
As with McQuarrie’s prior Mission: Impossible feature, Rogue Nation, Fallout loses its way the more it tries to integrate narrative tissue and characters from the prior films. This series has never been narratively satisfying enough to merit the construction of a true series mythology, and the more characters are added into the mix, the more it seems that these characters are saddled with uninspiring material while Hunt gets to do the truly showstopping stuff. (This becomes a significant issue during Fallout‘s helicopter climax, which fails to build momentum because of the constant cutting back to the rest of the ensemble, none of whom are doing anything anywhere near as interesting.)
To its credit, Fallout does seem to recognize that it is the conclusion of a certain trajectory, though it naturally leaves the door wide open for more shenanigans. With any luck, whoever directs the next one will bring the frisson of personal vision back to the series; it has been absent since John Woo directed his installment, and I miss it.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (more widely known as 1900) is a marvelously insane film, as vital as it is unsubtle. Bertolucci’s images always carry more charge than the dramatic and thematic constructs he uses as a foundation for them, and, in this regard, Novecento, shot by the legendary Vittorio Storaro, offers an embarrassment of riches.
Since watching it, I have been thinking about how much I enjoy sustained viewing experiences. Novecento has a runtime of over five hours (and, in its original cut, was actually released as two films). With any film of that length, your investment naturally ebbs and flows, and classic cinematic epics were designed in ways to accommodate that, to allow your attention to drift and to circle back to the object of your attention.
I can enjoy a film like Novecento and still walk away emotionally and intellectually energized, but most recent two-and-a-half hour blockbusters exhaust me. Our recent blockbusters pummel you with stimulation, desperate to keep you immersed.
I am reminded of a quote from Raúl Ruiz, taken from his Poetics of Cinema 2:
“There are those who believe that the best thing that can happen is for us to be fascinated by a film from beginning to end. Hence, they believe detachment is useless and boring. There is an expression that is widely used by film fabricators in Hollywood: ‘When you lose your spectator (that is, when you are no longer fascinating him), you lose him forever.’ According to this criterion, detachment is not only unnecessary but also dangerous. It’s not what I think. I have a few reasons to believe that detachment is indispensable, and not only so that we may apprehend the film rationally–we already know that reason doesn’t have a good name in the practice of art–but so as to experience the film’s events in their full complexity. We mustn’t forget that to experience a work of art is not simply letting oneself be fascinated by it, a mere falling in love with it, but rather it’s understanding the process of falling in love. For this one needs the freedom to move away from the loved object in order to return to it freely. The amorous encounter with the work of art is a practice that can be summarized in the following formula: ‘To love renders one intelligent,’ which certainly contradicts the formula which states being in love is more like being hit on the head by a club.”
The opening of The Lost World is, by some measure, the best sequence in any of the Jurassic Park films, our purest glimpse of Spielberg the Sadist since his camera watched dispassionately as a young girl was dragged beneath the waves by an unseen menace at the start of Jaws.
Jaws presents a vision of nature that is not just indifferent, but opposed, to humanity. Civilization only extends as far as the shoreline. The thrust of The Lost World is similar. Its Isla Sorna is a hostile space, a space out of time where prehistoric monsters roam free. To dare to journey there is to put yourself on the menu.
Here, the fodder is a young girl, brought to the island by extremely wealthy parents on a cruise. Spielberg spares us the undoubtedly horrifying images as she’s pecked to pieces by dinosaurs, but he lets us hear her screams and see the terrified face of her mother. The film then hilariously and chillingly smash cuts from the mother’s scream to Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) yawning in front of a poster in a subway station, as human-made an environment as has ever existed.
These are the film’s two worlds, and The Lost World suggests that regardless of which realm invades the other, the outcome won’t be good for humanity. Even those with good intentions, the environmentalists sent to protect this dinosaur paradise, are at risk; if you fix the broken leg of a baby Tyrannosaurus, you’re still dealing with a Tyrannosaurus.
In the film’s giddy monster movie coda, Spielberg unleashes the T-Rex on San Diego. To the T-Rex, the modern city looks like just another territory to conquer, its swimming pools serving as new watering holes, humanity’s domesticated canines making for easy prey. As it effortlessly prowls through the streets, it becomes comically clear that the king of the dinosaurs could easy become the king of the metropolis, a dark echo of the original film’s declaration that “life finds a way.”
Before Tom Cruise reworked Mission: Impossible into a cinematic showcase for his talents, Mission: Impossible was a television series, and a very good one. Created by Bruqce Geller, Mission: Impossible rode to success on the wave of 1960s spymania. It took a little inspiration from Jules Dassin’s heist film, Topkapi, offering a new, complicated challenge each week for its team–the Impossible Missions Force–to tackle and overcome. While the show had a recurrent cast of characters, each episode was driven less by its characters than the nature of the mission–often sketched in hazy terms during the episode’s opening moments–with each episode deriving its charge from the surprises present in watching the expert team maneuvering past any obstacles. At its height, the show was tremendously clever, and it had a groove all its own courtesy of Lalo Schifrin’s unforgettable music.
That music would be the one major element of the series to successfully make its way into every installment of the blockbuster film series of the same name (although none of the film composers who rearranged it could give it anywhere near the same punch that Schifrin did), though, at the start, its relationship to the television series was more discernible. The first of the movies, Mission: Impossible (1996), functioned as as a quasi-sequel to the original television series, albeit with a revisionist bent. Filmmaker Brian De Palma, whose aptitude for clockwork suspense sequences made him a natural fit for the material, was given the task of reshaping the property into a star vehicle for Cruise. The suspenseful opening of the film introduces a version of the TV show’s team, led by an aging Jim Phelps (Jon Voight, taking on the role originated by Peter Graves), only to memorably eliminate them all one-by-one during a mission-gone-bad. Young Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) survives, and is subsequently identified by the CIA as a traitor. He goes on the run and fights to prove his innocence. Using this framework, De Palma made the series into a vehicle for his own skepticism of the American state, which Mission: Impossible portrays as both deeply sinister and comically inept. Hunt’s journeys through the underworld lead him to the revelation that the true foe is Phelps himself, no longer a patriot, having been so disillusioned by the end of the Cold War that he’s now willing to murder his friends and betray his country.
Despite the film’s reputation as an action blockbuster, it’s more of a chilly spy thriller with a few intricate heist sequences in the tradition of the original series (the break-in to the CIA headquarters in Langley, in which De Palma exhibits his gift for sustained suspense, is, by far, the best of them). Its only true action setpiece, the memorable train sequence, occurs as a kind of outrageous victory lap after the film has dramatically and thematically resolved. The film’s true climax occurs moments prior. Hunt exposes Phelps’ scheme using the same tools of surveillance Phelps manipulated earlier in the film, rewriting Phelps’ false narrative (De Palma’s follow-up feature, Snake Eyes rephrases many of the same ideas explored in Mission: Impossible, including the basic structures of this resolution, but with more conviction and depth).
Cruise’s boyish charm and intense focus had not yet begun to mature into the gravitas he now brings with him to his performances, and the film’s Ethan Hunt, a thinly drawn member of the IMF team who has to rise from the middle of the ranks to the position of leader, remains a weak focal point for the film’s drama. Accordingly, the character’s personality changes significantly in the next few films. In Mission: Impossible II, Ethan Hunt would transition into a confident daredevil and ladies’ man, a kind of American James Bond with luxuriously flowing hair.
Mission: Impossible II marked Cruise’s apex as a marquee star and solidified Cruise’s reputation as an adrenaline junkie, eager to push himself beyond his physical limits.The film introduces us to Cruise’s Hunt while he’s engaged in a precarious rock climb, complete with a harrowing jump-stunt that Cruise proudly performed himself. The sequence, and the remainder of the film, is infatuated with Cruise, with his straining musculature, with his piercing eyes, with his clenched jaw, treating Cruise’s Hunt less as a character than a demigod, an exemplar of human physique.
Mission: Impossible II departs dramatically from the template of the original television series, making only the faintest gesture toward the Impossible Missions Force being a team-based operation (Ving Rhames comes over from the original film, though he has little to do, and he’s paired with a new supporting character, John Poulson, who has even less to do). The heist sequences give way to gun ballet and motorcycle acrobatics. If this resembles Hong Kong action cinema, it’s something a bit stranger; there’s a Limp Bizkit song on the soundtrack and Hans Zimmer’s score plays the Lalo Schifrin title theme on wailing rock guitar.
Cruise’s original conception for the Mission: Impossible franchise was that it would function as a big-budget version of The Hire, with auteurs reinventing the stylistic landscape of the series with each installment. So the franchise shifted from Brian De Palma to Hong Kong action film maestro John Woo, who had, at that point, been working in Hollywood for the better part of a decade. Woo conceived of the film’s major action setpieces before the film had a story, and Cruise brought screenwriter Robert Towne, who’d helped bring Mission: Impossible together, to give the sequel a story.
Mission: Impossible II borrows the narrative framework of Hitchcock’s Notorious, weaving it into a thriller about corporate malfeasance and the development of a bioweapon, the Chimera virus. The storytelling approaches of Towne and Woo do not have much overlap, and Mission: Impossible II feels oddly stranded between them, playing to the strengths of neither. The sequences where Woo feels like he gets to cut loose feel less integrated into the film than they feel like digressions from it, injecting operatic melodrama and gun ballet into the cracks of script written as a more conventional Hollywood action thriller. The cast, Cruise included, struggle when tasked with going to the extremes of theatricality that Woo requires of them. Still, while Mission: Impossible II is considerably weaker than the preceding Hollywood pictures helmed by Woo (Hard Target, Broken Arrow, and Face/Off), when Woo still delivers sequences of pure, passionate cinema in which image and physics yield to the impulses of emotion. Mission: Impossible II‘s climactic beach fight ranks among the best sequences in Woo’s body of work.
J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible III backpedaled away from the Ethan Hunt, Action Hero posturing of the second film. III paints Ethan Hunt as a veteran agent looking to get married and settle down (a moment that famously coincided with his highly publicized relationship with Katie Holmes). Here, Hunt has spent so long in the world of espionage that he has difficulty letting it go, and, by the end, his personal life and his professional life become hopelessly enmeshed.
This was the first Mission: Impossible film to use Cruise as a human ragdoll, deriving action thrills from the spectacle of the human body surviving punishment (as it did during its much-publicized stunt where Cruise is flung into the side of a car by the force an explosion). Still, this third entry lacks the showmanship of its predecessors. Abrams’ direction is undistinguished and frequently clumsy, particularly when tasked with the construction of intricate action sequences (III‘s helicopter chase is the most awkwardly assembled action setpiece in any of the Mission: Impossible films).
The script, written by Abrams with frequent collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, also lacks refinement and structural clarity, unable to build any momentum from its best ideas. What little momentum the film has largely stems from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s turn as Owen Davian, a flimsy role that Hoffman manages to turn into something forceful through the application of intensity. The film’s opening, its most memorable scene, comprises of a flash-forward that finds Ethan and his new wife, Julia (Michelle Monaghan), at Davian’s mercy. Davian interrogates Ethan under the threat of killing Julia. It unfolds as a series of close-ups of a desperate, powerless Cruise and an unyielding, ferocious Hoffman. Alas, when the film returns to the scene later, it is none the richer for the addition of context.
Despite its considerable weaknesses, III established a new template for the franchise, which would increasingly become more mindful of continuity and more unified in its embrace of III‘s tone. The team dynamic would be given slightly more weight, and a cast of regulars would start to coalesce. The fourth film, subtitled Ghost Protocol, was the one to cement this template, finding an comfortable balance between Hunt and his teammates. Director Brad Bird came on board to direct his first live-action feature, and he restores the series’ showmanship even if he doesn’t restore its pronounced auteurist signature. Bird constructs the film with the understanding that the property’s real villain is the “impossible,” and so the plot itself exists merely to serve as a skeleton on which he can hang sequences with clearly-defined, ever-mounting obstacles for Hunt and his team to overcome.
Bird brings the dynamism of an animator to the film’s setpieces, the most impressive of which tasks Ethan Hunt with scaling the heights of the Burj Khalifa. Hunt (and by extension, Cruise) seems to push himself further and harder here than he has in any preceding film, taking hits and damage, fighting his way to the finished line in just the nick of time. There’s a resignation that accompanies Hunt’s characterization here. He’s found that he can’t give up the spy game and, accordingly, all he can do now is throw himself back into it with near-suicidal abandon. The film’s climax progressively breaks down Hunt’s body until Hunt is left nearly immobile.
In its follow-up Rogue Nation, Hunt’s appetite for inflicting damage on himself becomes one of the film’s jokes, though hope looms on the horizon. Rogue Nation gives Hunt a new love interest in Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a double-agent enmeshed in the machinations of the mysterious Syndicate. Rogue Nation works very well when it focuses on the two of them. Faust and Hunt have a cool, appealing chemistry; they’ve both been in the game long enough to have acquired their share of scars. In the other, they see a kindred spirit and perhaps the glimmer of a less dangerous life.
Alas, Rogue Nation gradually falls apart the longer it goes on, struggling to balance its too-large ensemble (it carries over most of the Ghost Protocol gang) along with the demands of its story (its third act was dramatically reshaped over the course of production, transforming what was to be its climactic airplane stunt into a throwaway gag for the film’s opening). Writer and director Christopher McQuarrie may be a careful craftsman, but he lacks the panache to make a sequence more than the sum of its pieces. Still, when all of the pieces are in place, as they are during the film’s opera house setpiece (which is, by far, the best clockwork setpiece since the CIA break-in in the De Palma film), Rogue Nation offers plenty of amusement.
Cruise and McQuarrie re-teamed for its successor, Mission: Impossible — Fallout, which, going by the promotional materials, will hit a number of familiar beats while again pushing Cruise to the limit. Here, he’s doing dangerous helicopter stunts and a daring HALO jump. He even injured himself during a rooftop chase sequence (the footage of Cruise breaking his ankle has been utilized in the finished film). If the Mission: Impossible series has become increasingly overburdened by its own ever-increasing ensemble of regulars, this series, in which Cruise/Hunt always goes to extremes, is a welcome presence in a time when more and more stuntwork is generated in a computer. Here’s to watching Cruise do the impossible one more time.
Over at Rise Up Daily, you’ll find a lengthy piece by yours truly on the joys of John McTiernan’s superior remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.
The first opera I ever attended at the Metropolitan Opera was Puccini’s Tosca.
Under general manager Peter Gelb’s guidance, the Met had just tossed aside the sturdy, if creaky, Zeffirelli production of Tosca for a new staging by Luc Bondy, part of a broader initiative to reinvigorate the Met. Bondy’s stark, uninviting production did not prove to be a hit with critics or audiences. Bondy tossed aside the grandeur of Zeffirelli for a haphazard vision that did little to enliven the material. Still, I found the experience delightful. I had never heard Puccini’s score performed live, and, as performed by the Met’s orchestra, it was truly thrilling. I further enjoyed seeing and experiencing the Met itself, an exemplar of mid-twentieth century architecture that finds some strange coherence through its incongruous impulses.
This past Friday, I once again journeyed to the Met for yet another Tosca, this one staged by director David McVicar. The McVicar production exists more or less as an apology for the despised Bondy production, promising a lush and traditional take on a beloved classic. The critical response to McVicar’s staging of Tosca has been muted, as if it would be unseemly to praise a production that takes no significant risks. But who needs big risks when you’re dealing with Tosca? It’s an opera that rarely benefits from innovation.
McVicar’s new staging is certainly attractive. The audience greeted John Macfarlane’s sets with applause, and rightly so; they’re elegantly composed and ornamented. There’s an impressionistic aspect to the way they employ color and texture, further accented by the painterly quality of David Finn’s lighting effects.
But what truly distinguishes this new Tosca is its dramatic clarity. McVicar puts the opera’s characters first, deriving the most striking moments of his staging through their interactions. McVicar loses his way a little toward the end of Act I, during which he needlessly crowds the set with anonymous extras wandering through the cathedral. Otherwise he remains in command of the material, adding flourishes that accentuate some of the opera’s more incredulous turns (including a fairly clever rendition of Cavaradossi’s final moments).
The orchestra, under the command of Bertrand de Billy, sounded as vibrant as ever. Jennifer Rowley played the title role, stepping in for Anna Netrebko, who was ill. Rowley’s firy, complex Tosca was a marvel; she demonstrated breathtaking vocal command throughout her performance, but especially on her very fine rendition of “Vissi d’arte.” Michael Volle’s Scarpia proved to be a terrific match for Rowley’s Tosca, and the great battle of wills between them in Act II proved to be the highlight of the night. The third link in the trio, Yusif Eyvazov’s Cavaradossi, demonstrated great vocal force, but otherwise dynamism and expressiveness; he seemed to struggle with Cavaradossi’s quieter moments.
If this Tosca will do little to make waves in opera history, the Metropolitan Opera now successfully has an updated, contemporary Tosca that will nicely align with many of the other staples in its repertoire. As it looks to other classic productions to update (of the Puccini tentpoles, I’m personally hoping they develop a new version of Turandot,, which, unlike Tosca, would benefit from conceptual innovation), they could do worse to follow the example set by McVicar’s Tosca.
Filmmaker Lewis Gilbert passed away on Friday, February 28th, 2018, at the age of 92. Gilbert was considerably more than a Bond film director, but his three Bond pictures–You Only Live Twice (1967), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), and Moonraker (1979)–are especially dear to my heart. They were significant films of my youth, each having left an imprint on my aesthetic consciousness.
Gilbert’s three Bond pictures are all something of a piece with one another, built on similar structures and images. Gilbert’s first (and, as far as I’m concerned, best) Bond film, You Only Live Twice, opens in the vacuum of outer space, and his last film, Moonraker, ends there, giving his time with Bond a pleasant symmetry. All three of his Bond pictures understood that the primary pleasure of the Bond series has always lain in its surrealism, and working with such talented collaborators as Roald Dahl, Ken Adam, Freddie Young, Claude Renoir, Jean Tournier, and John Barry, he gifted us with some of the most striking, immense spectacle the cinema has ever seen.
In tribute to Gilbert, I have collected some of my favorite images from his three Bond pictures.
May he rest in peace.
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, people are collections of conflicting impulses that express themselves through behavioral patterns, driven less by will than they are by conscious and unconscious desire. They collide into one another like atoms, sometimes repelling one another, sometimes establishing bonds and forming new stable (or unstable) compounds. When Anderson’s films explore landscapes like that of the pornography industry or religious cults, they remain less interested in big, capital-letter ideas like Religion and Capitalism than they do in the way industries and communities function as expressions of collective behavioral patterns. Over the course of his career, Anderson’s films turn ever more to the mysteries inherent to faces and physical gestures, the portals by which we glimpse the chaos of the human mind.
Anderson’s latest feature serves as an extension of a journey he began in 2007’s There Will Be Blood. Often misapprehended as a Big Metaphor Movie, Blood was less of an allegory than it was a character study, following oil prospector Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), as he attempts and fails to establish social bonds with those around him. Starting with Blood, Anderson’s films feel increasingly impressionistic and improvised, roaming more and more freely in their observation of human activity. The ebbs and flows of Blood remain strange and unpredictable, a film of odd time jumps and loose ends. The consistent focal point is Day-Lewis, who, through Plainview’s utterances and postures, paints a portrait of gradual degradation. Detached from the human beings that surround him, Plainview’s behavioral pattern reinforces itself so much that he de-evolves. The film’s allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey‘s Darwinian landscape achieve resolution in the film’s final scene, wherein Plainview completes the transformation from human to ape.
Anderson’s subsequent feature, The Master, traced the relationship between a cult leader, Lancaster Dodd, and the object of his fascination, a mentally troubled young man named Freddie. Freddie, as played by Joaquin Phoenix, may be the closest thing in any of Anderson’s films to a creature of pure animalistic impulse, all twitchy energy and earthy desire. His presence brings out a bit of the animal in Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Dodd, too, who both loves Freddie for his freedom from decorum and because he sees in Freddie the fulfillment of his own creative project. Freddie remains in Dodd’s orbit for some time, but Dodd cannot satisfy him, and so Freddie finds satisfaction through more primal means than the dogmas and rituals of Dodd’s cult.
Anderson brought Phoenix over to his next feature, Inherent Vice, where he plays stoner detective Larry “Doc” Sportello. Vice‘s neo-noir shaggy-dog story allowed Anderson to explore the architecture of American society as a labyrinth both extending from and constraining a colorful spectrum of people-animals, each caught in the throes of their own peculiar madness. Its existential anxieties about society and the self are ultimately one and the same. Both society and the individual remain fundamentally unfathomable, following an uncertain path to an uncertain destination. Knowledge of either is, at best, provisional.
Anderson’s latest feature, Phantom Thread, takes the form of chamber drama, an appropriate progression for a filmmaker so fascinated with the revelatory power of human gesture. The intimacy of the form narrows and tightens Anderson’s gaze–he has never been so careful–as he observes its central trio, finding the madness in a world of beautiful surfaces. Daniel Day-Lewis once again re-teams with Anderson, appearing here as dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, who, with the aid and guidance of his sister, Cyril (Lesley Manville), maintains the prestigious House of Woodcock. When he becomes infatuated with a girl named Alma Elson (Vicky Krieps), his life is thrown into disarray.
Anderson, who has always been something of a sensualist, takes great delight and pleasure in surveying Woodcock’s work, in exploring the ecstasies of its lines and textures. These dresses are not just objects, but vessels of personality. They’re the intimate, sensual expression of Reynolds himself. Both Alma and Cyril partner with Reynolds in his work; he requires both of them to focus his creative energies.
Things begin to strain as Alma’s presence realigns Reynolds’ world, unbalancing the power dynamics that have sustained it. These pivots and shifts, some comic, some suspenseful, play out in tightly written scenes wherein much is left unsaid. In Day-Lewis, Krieps, and Manville, Anderson has three extraordinary faces that can say everything without uttering anything.
Phantom Thread offers a vision of romance rooted in evolving co-dependency. Phantom Thread‘s final line, uttered by Daniel Day-Lewis, gestures back toward Daniel Plainview’s final declaration from There Will Be Blood. In Phantom Thread, though, the emphasis has shifted: it is not an ending, but a new beginning. A bond has been formed. A new pattern emerges.
Caves of Altamira 