By David Elliott
Flix Nosh is a personal movie menu, fresh
each Friday.
APPETIZER: Reviews of Phantom
Thread and Proud Mary
Phantom Thread
In
playing Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom
Thread, Daniel Day-Lewis banishes any comparison to Billy Bob Thornton’s enjoyably
obnoxious gym teacher, Mr. Woodcock.
No, his character is a deluxe London couturier in 1955, his gray hair like the
tendrils of zealous perfection that drives his designs, his boney face the
beaked beacon of his bespoke world. Despising mere chic, Woodcock pampers every
dress, often sewing little messages and spells into their linings. And if a
lady should just happen to prolong her scraping of morning toast with her
butter knife, he will spike her with a high, Anglican finality, “There’s
entirely too much movement at breakfast.”
Paul
Thomas Anderson has made another of his films about men driven by visionary work
compulsions (previously: There Will Be
Blood, The Master, Boogie Nights, Hard Eight and, in a hippie-cool, satirical
way, Inherent Vice). Woodcock,
entranced by exquisite fabrics, designs what seem to be conservative British variations
on French couture (dowdy-Dior?). He will hang onto a 16th century
Antwerp lace for years, to find just the right model. That would be Alma, a
teashop waitress elevated to star model at the House of Woodcock. Alma’s new gig
is multi-tasking: model, cook, mistress, nurse, seamstress, mood target. To her
credit Vicky Krieps, a Luxembourg blonde with facial touches of young Meryl
Streep, hangs in there with Day-Lewis. Surely, he is the first actor who has
done a composite of Bogart’s nutty Capt. Queeg and couture icon Hubert de
Givenchy.
Alma
was the first name of Alfred Hitchcock’s wife, and the script (by Anderson) has
Hitchcockean drippings. Woodcock’s prim sister Cyril, played by Lesley Manville,
has the hovering chillness of the control maniac Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson)
in Rebecca. Caught between the fussy,
neurotic siblings, Krieps’s accent starts to echo Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, caught between the rival
sado-lusts of Cary Grant and Claude Rains. Jonny Greenwood’s deft score has Hitchcockean
surges. The Woodockian mood surges of Day-Lewis lead mistress Alma to become the
puzzled, then canny new mommy for a masochistic baby-man. The guy wears his dead
mother’s hair-snip near his heart, and enjoys seeing her ghost in a wedding
dress.
P.T.
Anderson has fashioned a seamless collage of period details, snotty manners,
purring clues and impressive clothing. But if he thought he could achieve the witty,
layered, very English triumph of his hero Robert Altman with Gosford Park, think again. As the movie
slowly unpacks its bonkers basket, we crave more clarity and substance. Maybe this
film should have been released as a fragrance, “Kinky Mist” – it’s pervasively
nowhere. Even Day-Lewis, a master of nuanced intensity, cannot give the film a vital
pulse. Around the time the plot’s culinary interest switches from asparagus to
mushrooms …but never mind. This chic meal is rich in good taste, yet oddly
tasteless.
Proud Mary
Nobody
in modern movies was more proudly sexy (yet also subtle) than Taraji P. Henson
as Vernell Watson, the lover “finer than frog’s hair” in Talk to Me. But that was ten years ago, and at 47 Henson cannot be
proud of Proud Mary. She’s still an
excellent actor, but our memories of her ace work in Talk to Me, Hidden Figures and The
Curious Case of Benjamin Button are here stuck in a flush of futility. The
maxi-foxy chops are simply no longer there to play this veteran kick-ass, stuck
between warring crime mobs in Boston (or is it Bronson?).
If
Henson thought Mary would be her crowning showcase, like Pam Grier’s in Jackie Brown, no chance. Director Babak
Najafi is no Quentin Tarantino, more like a new Renny Harlin (auteur of Skiptrace, Cliffhanger). He spreads the
mulch: an invasive song mix, Danny Glover as an old hood called Pop, a sad
street urchin hungry for love, Slavic thugs with accents like Moscow road tar, violence
dependent on overcranked editing, dialog rich in lyrics like “What’s with the
questions, lady? You a cop?”
Henson
tries hard, but often her face says: Nothing
I can do for this one. There is the yard sale aroma of desperate picking
and poking (three writers each provided a quota of duds). Proud Mary is another case of where the gristle meets the grunge, grievously.
Movies keep hugging dead action dolls from the last century, and CGI has not
been a salvation.
SALAD (A List)
Ten Crazy Romances to partner Phantom
Thread, in order of their arrival: Bette Davis and Leslie Howard in Of Human Bondage, 1934; Jennifer Jones
and Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun,
1946; Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out
of the Past, 1947; Gloria Grahame and Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place, 1950; Ninón Sevilla
and Tito Junco, Aventurera, 1950;
Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden in Johnny
Guitar, 1954; Shelley Winters and Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, 1955; Elke Sommer and Stephen Boyd in The Oscar, 1966; Chloe Webb and Gary
Oldman in Sid and Nancy, 1986; Linda
Riss and Burt Pugach, Crazy Love,
2007. And, of course, the most profound bond: Pee-wee (Paul Reubens) and his beloved
bike, in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,
1984.
WINE (Vin Orsonaire de Chateau Welles)
The
key powers of 1941 Hollywood gnashed their teeth over Citizen Kane before its May 1 release. Hearst columnist Louella
Parsons insisted that Will Hays’s Motion Picture Association block the film, on
the grounds that ‘Under the Code you can’t make a picture about a living
person” … Hays: ‘Well, it’s very probable that the picture will have to be
withdrawn. It’s a terrible scandal.’ Publicly, however, Hays made no move. One
mitigating factor was that (chief censor) Joseph I. Breen claimed that after
reading the script, (he felt) the film was not about Hearst.” (Quote from Frank
Brady’s Citizen Welles.)
ENTRÉE (Starlight Rising)
A
great film, The Long Goodbye had a
tortured release in 1973, one that “was beyond perverse. Chicago got the movie
before New York, and critics spread the spectrum (I tooted the loudest). L.A.
was chill to one of its finest film portraits. (Actor) Henry Gibson felt that critic
Charles Champlin, of the L.A. Times,
‘destroyed the picture in Los Angeles. Oh, he was just pedantically literal.’ Goodbye limped into New York, where
Vincent Canby came on board (‘attempts the impossible and pulls it off’), and
Pauline Kael raved one of her most enraptured endorsements, high on Altman and
Elliott Gould. But most reviews were ambivalent, and The Long Goodbye had a fast farewell in theaters.” (From the
Elliott Gould/Long Goodbye chapter of
my book Starlight Rising: Acting Up in
Movies, from Amazon, Nook or Kindle.)
DESSERT (An Image)
A great movie image is more than a still,
it’s a distillation.
John
Wayne visits director Budd Boetticher (right) and Randolph Scott on the set of Seven Men From Now (Batjac Productions,
1956).
For previous Noshes, scroll below.
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