Tag: Daniel Day Lewis

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Phantom Thread

Early in the 2015 documentary Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck, Cobain’s aunt Mary says offhandedly, “I’m glad I wasn’t born with the genius brain.”

Artists, scientists, inventors, and creatives of all sorts have a long history of struggling to fit in. Maybe because their creative drive, rooted in a need for novelty, renders them allergic to the ordinary world. To do your best work, sometimes you have to put the world at arm’s length and follow your muse where it leads you. But for those stuck in the ordinary world, this can be very irritating.

Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) definitely has the genius brain. His House of Woodcock is the best and most prestigious haute couture establishment in postwar London. His clients include the rich, famous, and royal. His fangirls tell him they want to be buried in one of his dresses. Reynolds was taught his trade by his mother, whom he and his spinster sister Cyrill (Lesley Manville) idolize long after her death. Cyrill acts as a kind of gatekeeper and manager to Reynolds. The attention to detail that has brought him fame and fortune comes with a side order of obsessive compulsive disorder. Reynolds is the human incarnation of the word “persnickety.”

Woodcock has had a string of girlfriends who he keeps around until he tires of them and Cyrill runs them off. One day, he’s having breakfast at a quaint restaurant near his country home when he sees a beautiful waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps). He asks her out in a most unusual way, and soon she is living with him and Cyrill. Their relationship eventually evolves into a three-way battle of wills, with Alma striving to get closer to Woodcock, while Cyrill tries to maintain her grip on her brother.

Daniel Day-Lewis (left) and Vicky Krieps tangle their lives in Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film about fashion and passion, Phantom Thread.

Phantom Thread is writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s eighth film, and if there’s one thing you can say about Anderson’s career, it is that he never does the same thing twice. Another thing you can say about Anderson is that his work can be divisive. Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood enjoyed near universal acclaim, but as for Magnolia, The Master, and his last film, Inherent Vice, well, you either love them or you hate them. Personally, I loved Inherent Vice, which puts me in the minority, and I can’t stand Punch Drunk Love, which alienates me further. So, for me, Anderson is hit or miss.

Day-Lewis, who earned a Best Actor Academy Award in There Will Be Blood, is pretty brilliant as Reynolds, the kind of guy who wears a blazer and vest over his pajamas. He cannot be satisfied, even by success. The day before a beautifully sewn royal wedding dress is to be shipped off he declares it “ugly.” His relationship with Alma plumbs new depths of passive aggression. But Alma gives as good as she gets, and maybe since she is the first person to ever stand up to him, he can’t let her go, even when their affair becomes life threatening.

As usual with Anderson’s work, the cinematography is meticulous and excellent. Alma and Reynolds’ love story is exceedingly chaste, which is remarkable given that the director is most famous for his ode to the pornography industry. The porn urge is redirected toward the clothes, with loving closeups of lace and sewing fingers. The most erotic it gets is a measuring session that borders on the sadomasochistic. The film’s deep obsession with accoutrement reminded me strongly of the work of Memphis director Brian Pera, while the claustrophobic atmosphere of social obligation and niceties lends a strong Barry Lyndon vibe.

Perhaps Phantom Thread is best understood as the director coming to grips with his own genius brain. It’s probably too simplistic to say Reynolds is a stand in for Anderson’s perfectionism, but the director clearly sympathizes with him. What makes this film stand out is that he also sympathizes strongly with Alma. In this “Me Too” moment, it seems that the myth of the Byronic, bad boy artist is crumbling, and that’s probably for the best. Lewis, who says he’s retiring from acting after this film, will grab all of the attention, but it’s Alma’s fight to bring Reynolds back into the real world that will resonate.

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Film Features Film/TV

Lincoln

I watched Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln unburdened by questions about its historical and biographical accuracy. However, I am familiar enough with the movies’ idea of Lincoln-as-American-cinema — or American-cinema-as-Lincoln — put forth in the films of great directors like D.W. Griffith and John Ford. Spielberg’s treatment of that idea is, for the most part, a dignified success. The best, and worst, thing I can say about his new film is that I hope it will displace Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in high school civics classrooms.

Although Lincoln generates some tension in its treatment of the backstory behind the ratification of the 13th Amendment outlawing slavery, it’s hardly a suspenseful yarn. It’s more fascinating and successful as a bold, blocky, cluttered film about both the imagination necessary for political change and the imaginative life of a great leader.

Of course, Lincoln is played by Daniel Day-Lewis; what other actor would any serious director choose to embody and explore pre-20th century American male archetypes? The first time Day-Lewis appears as Lincoln, he looks and movies like a Hall of Presidents robot made flesh and blood. But it quickly becomes clear that this Lincoln is different.

This Lincoln inhabits a world of storytelling and metaphor. This Lincoln quotes Hamlet and Henry IV and paraphrases Roman dramatist Terence’s idea that “nothing human is alien to me” in casual conversation. This Lincoln knows when and how to tell a good story when he has to. (My favorite part of the whole film might be Day-Lewis sighing, “I love that story,” after he delivers the punch line to a long, bawdy Ethan Allen anecdote.) This Lincoln debates fate and classical mathematics with telegram officers. This Lincoln slaps his oldest son for wanting to enlist in the Union Army. In short, this Lincoln is enormously charming — charming enough to inspire awe and fear when he reminds his subordinates that he’s “clothed in immense power.”

Interestingly, Lincoln’s foil in the film is not some racist Democrat opposed to the end of slavery; it’s the Radical Republican congressman Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones). Jones’ acid tongue and royal contempt for his peers are a perfect contrast to Lincoln’s crafty homespun pragmatism, and the scene in which Stevens simultaneously compromises himself while flaying his detractors on the floor of the House of Representatives is one of the movie’s most memorable.

Again, Lincoln is pretty good, even though it reeks of prestige and importance. Yet Spielberg’s visual skill seems constrained by some of the film’s more theatrical elements, such as screenwriter Tony Kushner’s superb script, which is loaded with ringing speeches and tasty confrontations. But Spielberg sneaks in a few moments of clever, moving poetry. In one wry associative moment, Spielberg cuts from the roll-call vote on the 13th Amendment to Lincoln, youngest son in his lap, perusing a book about insects.

There’s another passage when Lincoln, on horseback, views the devastation on a battlefield while the Stars and Bars cross flags with the Stars and Stripes. And, lest anyone forget, every time Secretary of State William Seward (David Strathairn) pulls on his cigar, moviegoers everywhere are reminded of a good cinematographer’s pleasure in shooting tobacco smoke against natural light.

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Could Abraham Lincoln Be Elected?

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There’s a new movie coming out starring Daniel Day Lewis as Abraham Lincoln, so I went looking for a quick read on Lincoln and checked out “Lincoln at Gettysburg” by Garry Wills.

I had forgotten most of the 272-word speech I memorized long ago that Lincoln delivered in three minutes. The main speaker that day, Edward Everett, spoke for two hours.

Wills goes into the making of the man and the making of the Gettysburg Address, which does not directly address slavery. “Lincoln was accused during his lifetime of clever evasions and key silences,” Wills writes. “He was especially indirect and hard to interpret on the subject of slavery.”

Lincoln dodged the subject in his 1858 debate with Senate candidate Stephen Douglas, and delivered some campaign speeches that would get him branded as a racist today. Here is one Wills quotes:

“I will say then that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races — that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor of intermarrying with white people. And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of political and social equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Wills writes that Lincoln’s political base, Illinois, had a case of “Negrophobia” and in 1848 amended the state constitution to deny freed blacks the right to enter the state.

“Lincoln knew the racial geography of his own state well, and calibrated what he had to say about slavery according to his audience.”

The movie “Lincoln” directed by Steven Spielberg, comes out November 9th and focuses on the year 1865.