Phantom Thread is a very enigmatic Best Picture nominee. Can it win anyway?

Each year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences nominates between five and 10 movies to compete for the Oscars’ Best Picture trophy — its most prestigious award, and the one given out at the very end of the night. What “best picture” really means is a little fuzzy, but the most accurate way of characterizing it might be that it indicates how Hollywood wants to remember the past year in film.

The Best Picture winner, in other words, is the movie that represents the film industry in America, what it’s capable of, and how it sees itself at a specific point in time.

So when we look at the nominee slate for any given year, we’re essentially looking at a list of possibilities for the way Hollywood will ultimately characterize the previous 12 months in film. And one thing that’s definitely true about the nine Best Picture nominees from 2017 is that they exhibit a lot of variety.

There are genre films and art films, horror films and history films, romances and tragicomedies. And thinking about what the Academy voters — as well as audiences and critics — found enticing about them helps us better understand both Hollywood and what we were looking for at the movies more broadly this year.

In the runup to the Oscars, Vox’s culture staff decided to take a look at each of the nine Best Picture nominees in turn. What made this film appealing to Academy voters? What makes it emblematic of the year? And should it win?

In this installment, we talk about Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedy-drama Phantom Thread, a strange and wonderful showcase for its three leads (Daniel Day-Lewis, Lesley Manville, and Vicky Krieps) set in a fashion house in postwar London. Phantom Thread may be the most “arty” of the year’s nominees, a carefully crafted, slyly kinky love story.

Alissa Wilkinson: It would not be an understatement to say that Phantom Thread was my most anticipated film of 2017. I have never not loved a Paul Thomas Anderson movie, and this one looked like it would contain everything I could have wanted: something weird and kind of kinky, set among the fashion world in London, starring Daniel Day-Lewis. This movie could not come out fast enough.

Yet after my first viewing, and then my second viewing, I found myself in a really strange place with the film. I think it’s excellent. I keep wanting to rewatch it (in fact, by the time the Oscars air, I’ll have seen it at least four times — including once with a live orchestra). But it didn’t wind up being one of my favorite films of last year.

What I love about Phantom Thread is how it’s like a perfect, pristine little puzzle box that begs you to disassemble each piece and examine it for clues. And yet it’s not a mystery, any more than any relationship is a mystery. It’s a story crafted so perfectly that it only begins to yield its secrets on second viewing. And while it feels airless in a way that ultimately makes me love it less than some of Anderson’s weirder, messier, more careening fare, I find myself thinking about it a lot.

What do you think attracted the Academy to Phantom Thread? How did you feel about it the first time you watched it, and have you seen it again since? What’s making this movie a Best Picture contender?

Genevieve Koski: One of my shameful admissions as a Movie Person is that I frequently have trouble connecting emotionally to Anderson’s work. I can certainly recognize the craft and precision and thoughtfulness of each of his films, but I often find myself considering them so much that I end up not feeling them.

Such was the case with Phantom Thread, a movie that on the surface seems made for me, a person who loves fashion-industry and romance stories alike, and was thrilled to see them combined by a filmmaker who, whatever my personal reservations about his style, is undeniably one of the best working today. But I could feel myself wanting to like the movie a lot more than I actually did as I was watching it.

That’s changed as I’ve gotten further away from the film and had a chance to noodle it out with people who did feel the connection that eluded me. On first glance, Phantom Thread can seem light and fluffy, like an omelet, but it sticks to your ribs and in your gut, like an omelet with a certain added ingredient. The more I mulled over how considered the film is, the more I realized that consideration is the emotion of the film.

Take, as just one example among many, the film’s treatment of food and eating, specifically the act of physically feeding a person. It happens repeatedly in the film, and each time, it says something different about where Alma and Reynolds’s relationship is at that particular moment, and about what each wants from the other. What could have been a clichéd motif — it’s a common trope that food equals nourishment equals love — becomes incredibly specific to this movie and this couple because Anderson presents it a little differently each time, creating narrative momentum and fleshing out character through what could have been a flat symbol.

Is that what attracted the Academy to this film? Honestly, I doubt it — Phantom Thread is one of the biggest head-scratchers for me among the nine nominees, not because it’s not deserving but because it’s both a romance and a very personal story, two things that don’t necessarily make for an Oscar shoo-in (though that feel less true than ever this year). So I tend to default to the assumption that this nomination is a response to that signature P.T. Anderson precision and craft — and Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance, which is Academy catnip — more than a response to the story it’s telling. Am I missing something else at play here?

Todd VanDerWerff: Anderson often leaves me wondering what others see in his work. I greatly admire There Will Be Blood while not quite connecting with it, and I appreciate the vibe of many of his other movies even though they dissipate from my mind almost immediately. And yet The Master, my favorite Anderson film, strikes me as one of the best American films ever made about faith.

But this is all preamble; I loved Phantom Thread, in ways I found a little surprising. It’s my favorite American movie about marriage since 2014’s Gone Girl (which I guess tells you ... something about my marriage). The movie’s depiction of long-term relationships as a kind of mutual hobbling, of finding a way to make someone just dependent enough on you, is pretty horrifying if you think about it too hard but also has a kind of emotional throughline that really hooked me.

This is also to say that I found Day-Lewis’s Reynolds Woodcock, while certainly compelling, the least interesting character of Phantom Thread’s central trio. As Alma and Cyril, Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville both create brilliant sketches of characters who try to live within the immediate orbit of a difficult, occasionally vengeful man. Their survival strategies are very different, but watching them navigate that space — and seeing how Alma ultimately solves this problem in a wildly unusual way — made for some of my favorite movie moments of last year.

Oh, also: Phantom Thread is really, really funny? I have often found that the dividing line between people who deeply love the movie and those who bounced off it comes down to how much you dug its incredibly dry sense of humor. It is, in its own way, the most quotable movie of 2017, to the degree that an offhand thing Alma writes on a receipt for Reynolds (“For the hungry boy”) has become a minor meme.

And finally, okay, the film is a swooning romance — but only to a point. Anderson is often compared to Stanley Kubrick, both for his meticulously designed frames and for his emotional chilliness. (The other director Anderson is frequently compared to, Robert Altman, could not be more different from Kubrick, which gives you an idea of just how unusual Anderson’s movies can be.) In that way, the movie I keep thinking of as a comparison point to Phantom Thread is Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut.

On some level, both movies are about the depths of longing. But when I think of, say, Reynolds seeking out Alma at the New Year’s Eve party, Phantom Thread strikes me as much more a story about power imbalances in relationships, and how they can shift and change over time. The characters in Eyes Wide Shut are on much more equal footing than those in Phantom Thread, but Phantom Thread is also very smart about how there are certain situations where Alma has power over Reynolds, when you might expect him to have more power over her.

Still, even with all that said, I find it difficult to quantify why I love this movie so much, or why the Academy did. But I’m thrilled that this weird, idiosyncratic tale of two people who shouldn’t be together — but are — has found its people. Somehow.

Alissa: I’m struck now by how hard it really is to pin down what Phantom Thread is “about.” It is certainly about power struggles in relationships — really among the trio of Reynolds and Alma and Cyril. It’s also about a kind of drive toward self-destruction that can hinder very tightly wound types, and the drive for control that can lurk in the soul of the seemingly meek.

But the movie’s two primary metaphors are the most interesting to me. One, as you point out, Genevieve, is food; the whole film unlocked itself for me when I noticed how Anderson uses food as a way to embody all kinds of ideas. One of those ideas concerns hunger and desire, as seen most clearly in the scene where Reynolds is driving his car like a maniac toward home so that he can, ahem, devour Alma, and she looks at him knowingly.

Phantom Thread’s other big metaphor is fashion itself: the tightly stitched, meticulously crafted clothing, the messages sewn into seams like a talisman against evil, and the way that fashion has, for most of Reynolds’s life, been an obsession that keeps him locked inside himself.

The latter is obviously meant to encapsulate much of the film — its title, after all, is fashion-related, not food-related. But I still struggle to figure out what it really means. Do either of you have insights into, or an appreciation of, Phantom Thread’s setting in the world of high fashion? Am I missing something obvious?

Genevieve: As I mentioned briefly above, I love fashion-industry stories, which are rarely attempted at the difficulty level Anderson is working at here. And even though I was a little disappointed that fashion design was more embellishment than underpinning with this movie, I did appreciate the acknowledgment of the physical labor that goes into couture, from the close-ups of calloused fingertips to the — too brief, in my opinion — glimpses we get of the Woodcock atelier. (If you’re intrigued by the atelier and want more insight into that system, allow me to suggest the 2015 documentary Dior and I, which is streaming on Netflix.)

But as you say, Alissa, fashion ultimately exists in this film as a way to give us information about Reynolds — about his fastidiousness, about his pride, about the way he’s haunted by the memory of his mother — and his relationship with Alma, rather than to tell us anything about fashion.

And to be clear, that’s okay; what makes Phantom Thread so sticky is that what it’s really about is not there on the surface; it’s tucked away in the seams and lining of this rigorously designed and structured film — its phantom threads, so to speak. (Don’t worry, I am groaning at me on your behalf.)

And speaking of phantom threads (I’m so sorry), I don’t think we should end this discussion without acknowledging this film’s overt connection to the 1940 Alfred Hitchcock film Rebecca, which Anderson has been open about. From the distinct character parallels — most notably those connecting the two films’ respective “phantom” characters, Reynolds’s mother and the titular Rebecca — to the isolated manor setting to the thematic obsession with food and control, Phantom Thread functions in many ways as a remix of Hitchcock’s 1940 Best Picture winner, the director’s only film to take that honor.

While I wouldn’t go so far to suggest that connection is top of mind for most Academy voters, I do wonder about its potential effect on a voting body that tends to respond positively to films that ruminate or comment on the movies themselves, which this film does, in a roundabout way.

Todd: I would suggest this movie struck a chord because fashion is less the point (though I think looking at the film through the lens of food and fashion yields plenty of rewards) than it is the vehicle to talk about something Hollywood loves: the difficulty of being in a relationship with a demanding person. Where Phantom Thread excels is that it doesn’t forget that both Reynolds and Alma are demanding people in their own way.

The usual template for this sort of story is “Woman (almost always a woman) falls for genius man (almost always a man). She makes demands of his time, but his work is his true passion. Slowly but surely, she learns to accept that as fact and realizes that what she loves about him is inextricable from his work.” Phantom Thread is exactly that story, but a) we’re never convinced that Reynolds is a genius because his clothes are a little outdated and we see his work primarily through Alma’s eyes, and b) since we see most everything through Alma’s eyes, the story is slanted a little more toward “his work is his true passion” in a way that makes you see how easily that kind of total devotion can curdle into neglect, disinterest, and abuse.

I don’t mean to imply that Phantom Thread is a movie about the #MeToo movement — far from it. But it is a movie about the negotiations we enter into whenever we embark upon a relationship of any sort with another human being, and how easy it is for those negotiations to devolve and lead into darker and darker territory.

The genius thing about the movie is how it plays that notion not for sadness for but bleak comedy. Anderson is a master of closing lines, and the one that ends this film (which I dare not spoil) is one of his best and one of his funniest.

Ultimately, I think Phantom Thread is about control, about how we humans are very good at turning even the very basic needs of existence — food and shelter and clothing and love — into opportunities to jockey for position, show off our brilliance, and exert our will on the universe. In some ways, it feels like the truest statement Anderson has ever made.

Alissa: So in five or 10 years, what idea, image, or scene from Phantom Thread will stick with you? What will you think of when someone mentions this movie?

Genevieve: I mean, I would say “for the hungry boy,” but I don’t want to steal what I’m pretty certain will be Todd’s answer. So I’ll instead highlight a later scene that’s informed by that weirdly iconic line in ways both humorous and chilling: the omelet stare-down, one of the most oddly tense and compelling wordless scenes I’ve ever seen on film, one that still makes me squirm a little just thinking about it.

Todd: FOR THE HUNGRY BOY!!!!!!!!

But really, the thing I’ll always think of first with Phantom Thread is that long, gorgeous shot of the New Year’s Eve party in full swing, with Reynolds locked out of the frivolity by virtue of his age and self-seriousness. It sums up the movie so well that it’s almost a shame the film continues beyond that moment (though since many of my favorite scenes are still to come at that point, I’m not complaining too much).

Alissa: My very favorite part of the film comes after things have come to a head between Reynolds and Alma — after she hears him complaining about her to Cyril — and you know something bad is going to happen. The camera cuts to her with a wicker basket in her arms, out in the woods, and the music turns all somber, and you just know exactly what she’s about to do.

The audience laughs every time, even though the scene is played as very serious and dramatic, because it’s just too perfect. Hearing that laughter against the deep, somber chords of the score as she searches for poisonous mushrooms to take him down is just a perfect encapsulation to me of what makes Phantom Thread work: pathos, romance, and a big, slow wink.

Check out what our critics roundtable had to say about all nine Best Picture nominees:

Call Me By Your Name | Darkest Hour | Dunkirk | Get Out | Lady Bird | Phantom Thread | The Post | The Shape of Water | Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri