Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017) Movie • Page 8

Jonny Greenwood’s ‘Phantom Thread’ Original Score is Used in Nearly 70% of the Movie

 

I saw this last night in 70mm at a special one off showing in Boston before it opens up for real here in 2 weeks. I'll spoiler tag my thoughts but they'll be largely pretty general.

-It feels very akin to There Will Be Blood and The Master. Like those films this is a deep exploration of a wildly obsessive character and his foil. DDL's performance is as you'd expect but Vicky Krieps and Lesley Manville are exceptional as well.
-It's not Inherent Vice where nearly every scene has something played for laughs but this is very funny, probably PTA's funniest film after that and Boogie Nights.
-The score is AMAZING. Jonny is incredible.
-It's as visually wonderful as you'd hope a PTA film would be. He is extremely competent here as his own cinematographer. There's an incredibly beautiful scene set on New Year's eve that rivals much of Mihai Malaimare Jr's swings for the fences in The Master. We even get a nice (albeit brief-ish) tracking shot like the iconic ones PTA and Elswit often used on the majority of their films together.
-As I said above The Master feels like his most similar film and I think as this goes wide it will receive a lot of comparisons. I found this a lot more narratively satisfying. The way in which the film shifts to allow Krieps's Alma to take the lead at different points is played to great strength.
A PTA/DDL/Greenwood film brings with it incredible expectations and I don't think this fell short of any of them. Anderson has tackled subject matter with more fireworks but is overall as sharp here as on his greatest work. Looking forward to it getting wide release and hearing what others think of it.

 

Not showing here until Jan 19 :(

 

Where at? I was hoping it’d be at Uptown sooner

 

Edina

 

Seeing this tonight, been looking forward to it all year!

 

Really can't wait to see this one.

 

The lack of critical hype has been kind of bizarre to me.

 

As a regular PTA fan I just seem to have verry little desire to see this

 

I found that this takes a looong time to get going, but once I was on the same wavelength I rather enjoyed it. It’s so funny and terrifying. Definitely feels somewhere between Punch Drunk Love and The Master.

 

what is the general tone of Greenwoods score for this one? does it sound feverish like Master and TWBB? or is it different? havent heard anything about it.

 

I definitely wouldn't define it as feverish, it definitely feels more lavish than the other scores. It fits the film quite well but I didn't feel like it played as prominent of a role as his work on those two films.

 

Hmm. What about that article above that said 70% of the film features the score

 

It's there, but I don't think it's as foregrounded as the other films. I guess it's less obvious, is what I'm trying to say.

 

I'm answering this as if all the music I remember from the film is greenwood so I could find out someone else is responsible for some of this stuff but it was very very piano based - lavish is a solid word, it feels in a lot of parts more victorian romance than 50s. But then there's a fair bit of synths and crazy rhythmic stuff especially at the more tense moments and it's almost unmistakably his.

There's a scene somewhere in the middle where I thought to myself damn if this wouldn't be a sick start to a radiohead song.

 

really itching to see this

 

Score is on Spotify

 

Jimmy said at the end of the second video that Phantom Thread is opening wide on the 19th so I imagine most of us only have one more week to wait.

 

Top 3 PTA out the gate. Will probably rise.

 

To me it feels like Jonny’s take on a “classic” film score, if that makes any sense

 

yeah. if i could have imagined Greenwood taking on John Williams or Hans Zimmer

 

I loooooved the score. Completely agree that it’s surprisingly...standard? I mean that in a good way.

 

listened this morning and i love the way he reinterprets the main theme throughout, degrading and making it more frenetic each time

 

It was the first time I thought “oh, he could win an Oscar or two just scoring Oscar bait” if he wanted or needed to (which he doesn’t).