Phantom Thread

Let’s ruminate about dresses. For them to be exquisite, they must be built by an army of women and one obnoxious asshole. The Phantom Thread is about that asshole. There’s a subgenre of dramas about misunderstood geniuses and artists who get to be assholes to everybody because they’re so gifted and talented that they aren’t held accountable for their assholey behavior. They must be allowed to work in silence. (see also Mother!) Only an artist who feels misunderstood would make a movie about an artist who’s unappreciated or misunderstood. But it’s kind of hard to feel any sympathy for the asshole in this, which makes the experience kind of distant and unemotional. But the dresses are pretty and the teapots are grand.

As for the character we the audience are asked to feel something about, she gets swept up rather easily by the asshole from a life we know nothing about. She doesn’t really exist before he (the asshole) asks her to move in to his house. How can we know if she’s able to restore sanity or normalcy to her life if we never know who she was before she met the asshole? Be that as it may, the dresses are pretty and the teapots are grand. It finally gets a little bit Hitchcockian in the final third when filmmakers weave in some thrillerish threads. You might find yourself wishing that the opening minutes of this yarn would have started out as taut.