The Big Picture

Daniel Day-Lewis delivers a comedic performance in Phantom Thread, showcasing his ability to play a petulant man-child whose controlling behavior is disarmingly funny. The film subverts the expectations of a period romantic drama, offering absurd human behavior, comedic moments, and a subversive romance that keeps viewers guessing. Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction creates a cacophony of tones in Phantom Thread, blending comedy, discomfort, and tears, resulting in a complicated and beautiful movie that reflects the macabre qualities of romance.

Legendary actor Daniel Day-Lewis has been renowned for his dramatic abilities and method approach to acting. His first collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood, earned him an Academy Award for his portrayal of the ruthless oilman Daniel Plainview. In 2017, Day-Lewis teamed up with Anderson again for Phantom Thread, a twisted romance centered on Reynolds Woodcock, a master dressmaker, and Alma, a younger woman who becomes his muse, portrayed by Vicky Krieps. Phantom Thread would go on to be Day-Lewis’ last film after he announced his retirement from acting during the press tour. His performance as Reynolds Woodcock garnered critical acclaim and another nomination for Best Actor at the Academy Awards, which is well deserved considering the intensity with which Day-Lewis approached the part. Reynolds’ behavior and mood establish the tone of every moment, before the push and pull from Alma throws both Reynolds and the movie itself off its rhythm to reveal that Phantom Thread is not exactly what it seems on the surface.

Phantom Thread has all the makings of a period romantic drama, from the production design to the music, painterly cinematography, and elaborate costuming. However, Phantom Thread’s greatest quality is that it is a comedy in hiding, and Day-Lewis’ performance can be appreciated in a whole new light when approaching the film through this point of view.

Daniel Day-Lewis Makes ‘Phantom Thread’ a Comedy of Manners
Image via Focus Features

When Vicky Krieps comes into the story as Alma, a waitress who trips and blushes at her first time seeing Day-Lewis’ Reynolds Woodcock sat in the dining room of her restaurant, there is an immediate class and lifestyle dynamic established in how the two interact. Reynolds is high-class, stuffy, and incredibly particular. Alma is interested in him, and he is drawn to her immediately. However, the two quickly run into conflicts at home as Alma is seemingly uninterested in bending to the confines of Reynolds’ strictly regimented day-to-day life. Krieps masterfully plays Alma on this tightrope where it cannot be determined to what degree she is naive or intentionally disrupting Reynolds as their relationship is established.

The comedic slant of the movie is entirely set in how these two actors interact with each other. As Alma loudly clanks dishes together during breakfast, Reynolds’ uncomfortable body language and passive-aggressive glares tell all you need to know about the type of person he is without any dialogue. Day-Lewis is portraying a character who appears on the surface to be nothing short of a genius. People talk to him as if he is an unknowable craftsman, but each moment where Alma is so easily able to unravel his psyche reveals that underneath the veneer of his artistry, he is a petulant man-child who cannot function if he does not get his way. The comedy found in Alma’s ability to disarm Reynolds is significant and rests largely on Krieps masterfully pushing Day-Lewis’ buttons and his emphatic reactions as these two characters clash.

Watching one of the greatest actors working today be prodded and needled by this woman who swings into his fancy lifestyle like a wrecking ball is inherently funny. All the reverence you tend to approach a Day-Lewis performance with is thrown out the window when Reynolds launches into a paranoid tirade about improperly prepared asparagus, eventually dramatically exclaiming that Alma must be a spy hired to infiltrate and sabotage his life after such a foul inconvenience has befallen him. The sequence is one of the funniest and most ridiculous displays of Reynolds’ controlling, immature behavior, while also functioning as a tense and uncomfortable fracture in the central relationship between Reynolds and Alma.

Every moment where Reynolds sighs, stomps, or whines about Alma making too much noise, or not cooking right, or not presenting herself the proper way evokes a finely tuned comedy of manners, a tool for lampooning used in fictional works from Shakespeare to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and more recently in something like Frasier which finds humor in how regular people respond to the eccentricities of high society. The odd couple of Alma and Reynolds works in multiple ways, as their unconventional but sincere love for one another results in scene after scene of conflicts which are as enlightening and fascinating to unravel as they are funny. Paul Thomas Anderson crafted a romantic story that is rich and contradictory in many ways and leaves much to be unpacked by the viewer.

‘Phantom Thread’ Refuses To Box Itself Into a Particular Tone or Genre
Image via Focus Features

In a film that presents itself as a period drama on the surface, Phantom Thread consistently subverts the pretension that can come with a film of this kind by allowing moments of absurd human behavior to work as comedy as well as the underlying story works as a subversive romance. Multitudes can be contained within a single dialogue exchange, as Paul Thomas Anderson refuses to be boxed in by any one tone or genre in how he mounts this story.

The tone of Phantom Thread is both sardonic and sincere. This tonal clashing is not a new thing for Paul Thomas Anderson, who wrote and directed The Master a few years prior. Joaquin Phoenix, who co-starred in The Master alongside the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, claimed the film was hilarious in a 2012 interview with TIME Magazine. Your average moviegoer is probably not walking out of that movie thinking about how many laughs it had, but this perspective can be applied to even the most unexpected of stories.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s larger works like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Licorice Pizza encompass dozens of stories and vary wildly from comedy, tragedy, romance, thriller, etc., but even his more narrowly focused films like Phantom Thread are a cacophony of tones that blend in a way which requires a director with an incredibly strong grasp on their story. Day-Lewis and Krieps maintain a dynamic that allows Phantom Thread to elicit laughter, discomfort, and tears all at once. Their relationship is hard to parse, and you may not be able to nail down whether these two are going to make it–– or if they should. Masterful performances from two actors at the peak of their powers spark a chemistry unlike any other movie of this kind, shepherded by a great director who knows how to deliver an all-encompassing, complicated, beautiful movie that reflects the strange, sometimes macabre qualities of romance instead of a polished love story.