The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Thomas Anderson · a film · 2017 · about 130 minutes · music by Jonny Greenwood · costumes by Mark Bridges
Mode
Gothic romance played as a comedy of manners; a marriage plot, a portrait of a maker and a fairy tale of the witch who feeds
Mythos
The ogre tamed and the witch who feeds; the dead mother in the house and the second wife who must displace a ghost; Pygmalion reversed
Phase
From a breakfast at a hotel on the coast to an omelette, in the House of Woodcock in the 1950s, told by a fire to a young doctor
Presentation
Feature film, about 130 minutes, in English; no director of photography credited; Jonny Greenwood’s near continuous score, Mark Bridges’s costumes, Dylan Tichenor’s cutting
Register
Hushed rooms and soft light, long meals made loud by the scrape of a knife, romance in the strings while the plot moves toward poison
Scale
One couple, a sister and a dead mother, a house of seamstresses and its clients
Governing Proposition
A London couturier who runs his house and his days by rule takes a young waitress as his model and companion, and she learns that he can love her only when he is helpless, and poisons him to make him so. The wager of the film is that a lasting intimacy can rest on a pact of alternating weakness, made knowingly by both, and that the surface of a heritage picture, couture and soft light and a romantic score, can carry that pact as comedy and romance at once, its terms hidden like a message sewn into a lining until the last meal.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a woman by a fire, telling a story. Her name is Alma, she is played by Vicky Krieps, and the listener is not yet shown; only later is he revealed as a young doctor, Hardy. Everything that follows is her account, given to a man whose profession is to judge whether someone is ill, and the audience sits where he sits. It is a confession, and it is also a seduction, and the film will not say until its last scenes what he is being asked to accept.
Her story begins without her. The House of Woodcock, in London in the 1950s, dresses the rich and the titled, and it runs on the rules of one man. Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, has a morning routine kept as strictly as a liturgy, and his sister Cyril, played by Lesley Manville, keeps the House and keeps him. A companion is dismissed, and it is Cyril who sees to it. The women who come into this house come as models, clients and companions, and they leave when the routine requires.
Paul Thomas Anderson wrote and directed the film, produced with JoAnne Sellar, Megan Ellison and Daniel Lupi. No director of photography is credited. Jonny Greenwood wrote the score, Dylan Tichenor cut it, Mark Bridges designed the costumes and Mark Tildesley the sets. It runs about 130 minutes, in English, and was released in the United States on 25 December 2017. Its subject is a maker and his household, and its surface is the one his House sells: couture, soft light, rooms kept hushed for work.
Movement II
Reynolds drives into the country, and Greenwood’s piano and strings go with him. At a hotel on the coast a young waitress serves him, and he orders breakfast: a great deal of it, item by item. It is the first measure of appetite in the film and the first exchange of power. That evening they dine together.
He brings her to his country house for a fitting. There Cyril arrives, and it is Cyril who takes down Alma’s measurements, so that the figures of her body are recorded before anything else of her is known. She is measured as a client would be, and the scene is courtship and inventory at once. Alma becomes an object of the House before she is a person in it.
She comes to London as model and companion. She stands for fittings, and the dresses are made on her. The work is shown at length: the seamstresses, the fabric, the hand at the hem, the gown for a countess. Reynolds sews a message into a lining where only the maker knows it, and the film keeps its own meaning the same way, hidden inside a beautiful surface until it is turned out.
Movement III
A rich client, Barbara Rose, is married in a Woodcock gown, and at the wedding she drinks until she falls. Reynolds and Alma take the dress back from her where she lies. It is the House’s law spoken plainly: the dress is his work before it is her property, and it will not be worn by someone who dishonours it. For once the two of them act as one.
At home the friction begins in small sounds. Alma butters her toast at breakfast, and the scrape of the knife, made loud, is an assault on his morning. She pours tea, and the pouring is loud. In a house governed by one man’s rules the smallest noise is a breach, and the film carries the struggle in what it lets the audience hear. Then Alma cooks him a surprise dinner, asparagus in butter, and he is furious. Tenderness offered on her terms is an act of war in his house.
On New Year’s Eve he will not go out. She goes alone to a costume ball, and he follows, walks through the crowd and the streamers, and brings her home. It is a reconciliation, and it settles nothing. The film has given her no power in this house except to be needed, and she sets out to find a way to be needed.
Movement IV
Alma puts a wild mushroom into his tea. He falls ill while making a wedding dress for a Belgian princess, and collapses. The seamstresses work through the night to repair the dress. The poisoning is the hinge of the film, and it is played as calmly as everything else in the House.
In his fever Reynolds sees his dead mother in a wedding dress, standing at the foot of the bed. It is the one supernatural image in the film, and its most haunting. The mother is the cause of the pattern: the routine, the women who come and go, the wedding dresses made for others. Alma refuses the doctor and nurses him herself. Recovering, he is tender with her, and he asks her to marry him.
The fairy tale is now plain. A maker who measures and dresses women has been measured, dressed and reduced by a woman who feeds him to keep him, and the mushroom is a gift in the oldest sense. Over it lies the gothic: a dead mother present in the house and a second woman who must displace a ghost, in the shape of Rebecca. The cure for the ogre is to make him ill.
Movement V
The marriage strains. Restored, Reynolds is again the man of rules, and Alma is a noise in his house. A long-standing client leaves the House for a more fashionable one, and the order he has built begins to look old. He tells Cyril that the marriage is ruining him. The pattern has returned, and Alma knows its cure.
She cooks him an omelette with the mushroom in it, in front of him, and he watches her do it, and he eats knowing what it is. “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick.” Day-Lewis plays the line with tenderness and fear in one expression, and Krieps answers with the stillness she has kept from the start. The pact is made in the open. One of them can love only when helpless, the other can be secure only when needed, and each consents to the other’s terms.
Imagined futures pass, a child, a party, a nurse, and the film does not say whose they are. Then the film returns to the fire and to the doctor, who has heard the whole account. At the Academy Awards of March 2018 the film won Best Costume Design and was nominated for Best Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress and Original Score. It has been argued over since, as a portrait of a controlling man undone or as a romance of mutual control. What it has made is a marriage plot that ends happily in poison, its terms sewn inside a beautiful surface where only the makers know them.
Act III · The Twelve
The film is a series of tests of a household’s rules, and most scenes are required by that design. The breakfast order is the first measure of appetite and the first exchange of power. The measuring scene makes Alma an object of the House before she is a person in it. The asparagus dinner shows that tenderness offered on her terms is an act of war in his house. The first poisoning is the hinge, and its fever gives the cause of the pattern. What gives: Barbara Rose’s wedding runs past its use, the New Year’s ball repeats a reconciliation the fever carries better, and some scenes of the House at work are atmosphere, not turn.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: a lasting intimacy can rest on a pact of alternating weakness, in which one partner can love only when helpless and the other is secure only when needed, and both make terms for it knowingly. The last meal makes it statable on screen: he watches her cook the mushroom, and eats. It discloses something real about marriage as a negotiated order and about appetite and control as one subject, much of it through sound and image, and that counts in full. Held below the gate by three things: the condition is one couple’s arrangement more than a general truth; much of the force is the mood of the House; and the pact is drawn partly as fable.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The elevation is mostly beauty, with a cold thread of dread, and it recurs. Jonny Greenwood’s score lifts scene after scene: the piano and strings under the drive into the country, the long lines over the fittings. The dresses rise on the women who wear them, the countess’s gown, the princess’s wedding dress mended through the night. The mother in her wedding gown at the foot of the bed is the one supernatural image and the most haunting; at the omelette tenderness and fear are one expression on his face. Height comes at three or four points, and frequency is good. The register is luxurious more often than high, and the sublime of terror is hinted rather than reached.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The myth is built and bears load, a myth of the household more than of the world. Its structure is the fairy tale of the ogre tamed and the witch who feeds: the maker who measures and dresses women is himself measured, dressed and reduced by a woman who poisons him to keep him. Over it lies the gothic: the dead mother in the house, and a second wife who must displace a ghost, the shape of Rebecca. Pygmalion is reversed, and Reynolds and Alma are never types. Held below the gate because the archetypes are evoked as much as built, and the gothic is often a register laid over a comedy of manners.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the British costume drama and the gothic romance: Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) and Suspicion (1941), Ophüls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Powell and Pressburger’s colour and appetite. The departure is real: a heritage surface of couture and 1950s London carries a perverse marriage plot that ends in consented poisoning as its happy ending, played as comedy and romance at once. For the director it was a turn from the oil fields of There Will Be Blood to a chamber piece. The stake was tonal. Held well below the gate: the departure is made within a proven mode by classical means, and a wager on a star and a lavish surface is not a wager on the form.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and some of what the film knows is lost, not all. The frame makes the audience the doctor, hearing a confession that is also a seduction. Dressmaking is the film’s figure for itself: a message sewn into a lining where only the maker knows it, and the film hides its pact the same way until the omelette. The sound of eating carries the struggle as only sound can, and the score sets the whole as romance while the plot moves toward poison. Held at the figure because the substance would pass into a novel with less loss than most films of this rank: Taxi Driver, whose form is one man’s perception, stands at 8.8.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Nine years of evidence are enough to forecast and not to demonstrate. The questions have stayed open: whether the film is a portrait of a controlling man undone or a romance of mutual control; whether the ending is a feminist reversal or a fantasy of submission; how far Alma’s narration can be trusted, and what the doctor is hearing; whether the imagined futures at the end are hers or his. The breakfast and the asparagus have passed into common reference. On return the score, the costumes and the frame read differently once the pact is known. But the questions are fewer than the deepest films keep open, and much of the return is pleasure in surface and performance.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 2017, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is moderate and real: the film showed that the heritage picture, a genre treated as safe and middlebrow, could carry a dark comedy of power without breaking its surface, and it made a woman’s poisoning of her husband the solution rather than the crime. It did not reorganise what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: over nine years it is cited among the period films of its moment that sharpened the costume drama’s edges, and its mark on fashion imagery and on the critical taste for the toxic romance is visible but diffuse. The Favourite (2018) came from another line.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole, in one version, with nothing lost. Its presence over nine years is continuous, in repertory screenings and steady discussion, wide for an art film, though wide presence earns little on its own. There is no charge on the fabric. The surface is fixed to a period, the 1950s, but as setting rather than as the film’s own moment, and that dates less than a contemporary surface would. Part of its present standing is bound to its star’s retirement, announced at release, which is a circumstance and not the work, and is not weighed. Survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and nine years is a short demonstration.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Daniel Day-Lewis builds Reynolds from small controls: the eyes over the teacup, the voice kept low until it breaks, a body precise until it is ill. Vicky Krieps holds her ground with a stillness that hides intention until the end; Lesley Manville’s Cyril governs the house with a single look. Greenwood’s score carries the romantic surface the plot undermines. Mark Bridges’s costumes are the House’s work made visible, plausible as great couture. The uncredited camera is quiet and exact, and Dylan Tichenor’s cutting keeps the long meals tense. The costs: the score’s near continuity flattens contrast in the middle stretch, and the clients and the doctor are sketched.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a man undone at breakfast by the sound of toast, and the fevered vision of his dead mother in her wedding dress. One law governs both: the House is a body governed by Reynolds’s rules, and whatever enters it must submit or make him ill. The breakfast is the rule defended; the fever is the rule broken, and what lay beneath it showing. The poisonings, the dresses and the frame obey it, and the ending keeps it: he submits to the illness as a new rule. Comedy, romance, gothic and near ghost story are held in one tone. The strain is small: Barbara Rose’s wedding plays as broader satire, and the imagined futures loosen the law for a moment.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The orders held are few, and held fully: consciousness and the couple at the centre. The family: the sister, the dead mother, the marriage. Labour: the seamstresses at work through the night, the craft and business of couture. Class: aristocratic clients, a princess, a rich American widow, and Alma raised from waitress to wife. The body: appetite, illness and the poisoned stomach. Fashion as a social order, in the client lost to a more modern house. What holds the axis lowest is what is barely present: history, for postwar London is decor; the state; the natural order beyond the drive into the country; and the sacred, present only as a ghost and a wedding. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.9, then The Inner Law at 8.7, then The Inevitable and The Living Form at 8.5. Three performances built from small controls, a score that carries the romantic surface the plot undermines and costumes that make the House’s work visible; one law, that whatever enters the House must submit or make its master ill, from the breakfast to the fever; a series of tests of a household’s rules in which most scenes are required; and a form that hides its pact as a lining hides a message.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2: the couple, the family, labour, class, the body and fashion’s order are held, but history is decor and the state, the natural order and the sacred barely enter. Above it, Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 7.8: a moderate force made by classical means, with a reach that is visible but diffuse, and nine years of whole survival, too short a span to demonstrate it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five axes: The Unconcealment at 8.3 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 fall two tenths short of the bar of 8.5, The Swerve at 8.0 five tenths short, and Pressure on Tradition at 7.8 and The Imperishable at 7.8 seven tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate and by the aggregate, 8.2 from a sum of 98.6, below the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Phantom Thread as released in the United States on 25 December 2017, about 130 minutes, in its one version and in its original English, from Alma by the fire to the fire again: written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, produced by JoAnne Sellar, Megan Ellison, Daniel Lupi and Anderson, with music by Jonny Greenwood, editing by Dylan Tichenor, costumes by Mark Bridges and production design by Mark Tildesley; no director of photography is credited. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. One line is quoted, the only one whose words are certain here; other speech is described. Details that could not be verified, among them the production companies and distributors, who served in fact as the film’s photographer, the film stock, the exact running time, the keepsake sewn into Reynolds’s coat and the counts of scenes and shots, are not given.