Actresses who give me the Krieps

As I still try to wrap my head around Phantom Thread, I'm also still trying to wrap my head around Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps.

Deciding how I feel about her may be key to deciding how I feel about the movie.

I don't have any doubt that Krieps gives a good performance in this movie. But there's something about her that gives me the creeps, and I'd say that even if her last name didn't make it a play on words. (I was going to say "clever play on words," but I don't know how clever it is.)

Being given the creeps by someone is usually a good thing in a movie. It means they are burrowing into some core part of your subconscious that produces a reaction of revulsion in you. It may not seem like it, but that's usually something you want. The unsuccessful actor is the one that makes you feel nothing.

But I don't know with Krieps. I find it kind of hard to look at her. I don't mean that she's ugly; she is probably quite pretty, though this movie takes pains to make her seem very plain at times, and it's to her credit that she allows the camera to see her this way. It's a performance lacking in vanity, which is another thing we usually want, or should want anyway.

No, the thing I find hard to look at is encapsulated pretty well in the above picture, which is why I searched until I found it. Yes, that's a pleasant expression, for sure. A warm, welcoming expression. But there's also something alien about it that I can't quite put my finger on. It's the eyes, or maybe the smile looking just a little forced. I find it discomfiting.

But what I really find discomfiting is the emotions that are behind it. Krieps looks at Daniel Day-Lewis in this movie with an almost confronting level of need. She yearns in a way that is off-putting. But it's not the desperate need that expresses itself by clinging to someone's leg as they try to shake you off, staring at them with haunted, pleading eyes. That might have almost been better. Krieps expresses a kind of psychopathic unwillingness to disguise the nakedness of her need. When Day-Lewis shows her some attention in that restaurant over his breakfast order, she looks at him with these eyes that seem to say "You have just signed an unwritten contract with me, and it is a lifetime contract, and I am so certain of its successful fulfillment that I am not even being demure or coquettish. I am diving in headlong, and I lack the self-awareness to realize I need to cloak my intentions through the traditional techniques of flirtation and seduction. I am scooping an overflowing helping of my need onto your plate and making you eat it." Of course, the food metaphor becomes a lot less metaphorical later on.

Can all that be gotten from one expression? Well, then Vicky Krieps is a good actress indeed.

Certainly we would say that should become part of her perspective as the movie goes on and she grapples with her jealousy and desire to shift his attentions back to her. But it's this opening scene where this gawky girl exudes a sort of resplendent, vampiric emotional dependency that throws me. Maybe it throws me in the right way, maybe it doesn't. I'm still deciding.

Vicky Krieps isn't the first one to unsettle me in this way. Here is another actress who I find it hard to look at, because her expressions are so needy and confronting:

Although I'm a huge fan of her sister Rooney, I have just never been able to fully come around on Kate Mara. She also gives me the creeps. I think it dates back to how she was used in American Horror Story in the only season of that show I watched. She constantly had this look in her eyes that was equal parts needy and accusatory. I felt like her eyes were boring through the screen into me, and I wanted to squirm right out of my seat.

There's going to be something vaguely unsavory to the fact that the three people I feature in this piece are all women, but at least with the third we are going to end on a positive note. I used to get a creepy vibe also from her:

That still is from Wicker Park, and it was my first exposure to Rose Byrne. I suppose she would have something in common with Mara's character from American Horror Story, to the extent that I remember the plots from either of those films/TV shows -- an "other woman" spurned, trying to make hell for some man, but only because she's so desperately in love with him that her rage and passion have gotten all twisted up. (You'd think I had a woman like this in my own life, but I haven't.) There was something about the look in Byrne's eyes in that movie that made my skin crawl.

The good news is that Byrne has come back from that to become one of my favorite working actresses, in part because she did something seemingly counterintuitive with her career -- she became one of the most deft comediennes going. As just one example, she absolutely kills it in Spy, particularly this line reading: "When I was a little girl growing up in Bulgaria, which is the worst by the way. Poor people everywhere and cabbages constantly cooking. There was this woman who was kicked out of her house and she lost all her money. She couldn't even sell her body. So she became a clown on the streets. She would perform all her tricks standing in mud, and just cry and cry. You remind me of this woman." And later: "You're funny. It's the Bulgarian clown in you."

Where was I?

Oh yeah, so there's hope for Krieps and Mara.

And no, I don't really live in fear of women needing me and wanting to kill me in equal measure. Why do you ask?

A hard eight: Ranking Paul Thomas Anderson

Twenty-two years ago Paul Thomas Anderson began his feature-directing career with a movie called Hard Eight, or known by its original title, Sydney. (Not the city with the opera house; a man's name.)

Many other directors would have made a lot more than seven feature films since then. Heck, Woody Allen has made 22. But Anderson is no ordinary director. He's a craftsman with a vision, and he takes time to make his films. He has two separate gaps of five years without a film during that period, bookended by Punch-Drunk Love in 2002 and The Master in 2012. When he makes a movie, it's an event, and whatever it is, or however much you end up liking it, you need to see it.

That's why I did in fact go see Phantom Thread in the theater on Tuesday night, even though I've moved on from 2017. (I may still see Lady Bird, which finally opens today.) I've seen every Anderson film on the big screen except Hard Eight, because I didn't know who he was at the time, and Inherent Vice, which I skipped on the big screen because I had moved on from 2014 at the time it was released.

It's an event. You can't not.

And though I haven't done a post like this in a long time, ranking the career of a prominent director, I figured I couldn't wait for Anderson to get to ten feature films, because that could take another ten years. Besides, the symmetry with eight films and Hard Eight was too good to pass up.

So, without any further ado, my rankings of the the top eight films of one of our great contemporary masters, Paul Thomas Anderson. Interestingly, I noted that each of his films, including Phantom Thread, already has a label on my blog, meaning it's been discussed by me at least once before. Definitely worthy of a career retrospective, I'd say.

And sorry for the lack of drama, but when I've done these in the past -- with Danny Boyle, David Fincher, Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers and Pixar, all of whose films I had also seen at the time -- I've gone from the best to the worst.

1. There Will Be Blood (2007) - It probably comes as no surprise that my #1 movie of 2007 is also my #1 Anderson movie, though I suppose you can't take that for granted, as one ranking year is different from another. Though in this case it does hold true. It was not only my best of the year, it was my eighth best of the decade. It's also the Anderson movie I'm most due to rewatch, as I saw it twice in the theater and then not again since then. (If you are this convinced of the quality of a film, you don't need to revisit it to decide its worth on a best-of-the-decade list.) What can a person say about There Will Be Blood that has not already been said? Well, I don't know that this exact phrase has been used: it's a capitalism horror movie, with a frightening monster at its core in Daniel Day-Lewis' Daniel Plainview. I can't remember another instance of this film's era being recreated with such epic grandiosity, one strangely unbound by the Hollywood traditions with which it rubs elbows. This is a movie that opens with the entrancing, moldering noise of Johnny Greenwood's score, then moves into 20 minutes without dialogue as a man digs desperately for gold in the bottom of a well. Ultimately, though, the dialogue belonging to Plainview -- and its delivery by Day-Lewis -- is one of the most indelible, indisposable elements of the film. "Bastard in a basket" and "I drink your milkshake!" both came from a film that didn't need a single word to put us in its spell and keep us there.

2. Boogie Nights (1997) - It's the greatest Martin Scorsese movie that Martin Scorsese never made -- but so what. Anderson has good taste, and a skill set to honor that taste. It's interesting that Anderson was once considered a very successful mimic of other great directors (including Robert Altman in Magnolia), because as he has honed his voice, he's given us films that are truly like no one else's. Which doesn't mean that the voices he channeled didn't represent some of his best work. This sprawling epic through the porn industry is a tour de force of set design and cinematography, and it felt like a first with its frank look at the inner workings of that industry. (A topic that has since been revisited umpteen times in lesser films by less talented filmmakers.) In addition to breaking Mark Wahlberg as a star who would become one of Hollywood's most in demand, it also revived Burt Reynolds (briefly), and gave great showcases to the likes of Julianne Moore, Heather Graham, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Don Cheadle and William H. Macy. (And let's not forget Alfred Molina's one scene, a total mindfuck of gonzo tension.) Boogie Nights is a director's movie, it's an actor's movie, it's just a damn rollicking specimen of the craft, and it still holds up today like nobody's business.

3. Hard Eight (1996) - Anderson's least Andersonian film -- at least in terms of the size of the canvas on which he would come to paint -- is also my third favorite. I may have trouble articulating why this film works so well for me, but it probably gains from being seen within the perspective of the rest of Anderson's career, since it is so small in scale, making it feel like an example of Anderson's range rather than just the film on which he cut his teeth. Its intimacy it its most winning element, as every scene feels small and compressed, but only because the lives these people live are so small and compressed. They operate in very small circles, circling around craps tables and anonymous motel rooms, ultimately finding themselves in the position to express their deepest yearnings and fears to one another. Philip Baker Hall puts on a master class as Sydney, the man whom the movie was initially named after, and it reminds us that it's a shame he was not given more starring roles. (He's not dead yet, but being 86 years old tends to limit some of the prospect of that ever happening.) Sydney's dialogue is probably one of the clearest examples you'll see of a writer-director directly delivering his own ruminations about the way the world works, but Sydney and Anderson are both wise people from whom I am ready to receive such ruminations.

4. Punch-Drunk Love (2002) - This is the highest Anderson film on my list that I've seen only once, and I do think it benefits some from the words of rhapsody directed toward it that I have absorbed in the ensuing years. This is the first time I found Anderson really burrowing down into something truly eccentric, and I admit that it left me off balance for much of the movie, in a way I was not always sure of. But just recalling some of the scenes and images from that film that still stick with me -- like the piano being dumped off the back of that truck, or Adam Sandler pacing around the room on the phone while the walls and score seem to close in on him -- remind me of the power of Anderson's tools as a filmmaker. Punch-Drunk Love is often thought of as a line of demarcation between when Anderson was doing things that were sort of conventional and when he stopped doing that -- the moment of him finding his voice. (The plague of frogs at the end of Magnolia could also be considered such a moment.) The filmmaker that has excited us with the sense of not knowing what he will do next, that has characterized all his subsequent films, was born here. The fact that some of that has resulted in diminishing returns for me is something I hope to grapple with on second viewings of some of the films lower on this list. Punch-Drunk Love was the beginning of Anderson not giving a fuck what we thought of his films, and that in itself is exciting.

5. Magnolia (1999) - And here is my highest ranked Anderson film where I find significant portions of the film problematic. I previously mentioned that this felt like an homage to Robert Altman, and it was earlier in the 1990s that I fell in love with that director, first with The Player, then with Short Cuts. Magnolia feels a bit like Anderson's Short Cuts ... with a downpour of frogs at the end. Even back then, when I was less jaded and more open to any way a director wanted to try to blow my mind, I found parts of this movie too clever by half, like the story about the person who was committing suicide but shot halfway through the leap from atop the building, transforming the death from a suicide into a murder. I don't even remember what the point of that little interlude was, and that's emblematic of Magnolia, in which Anderson seems to be working out some of his sophomoric musings, the possible ramblings of a stoner. I also consider it to be one of the most emotionally overwrought films I've ever seen. That said, bits of this movie stick with me like few other movies do, and some of Anderson's big gestures truly hit, particularly all the characters breaking the fourth wall to sing along to Aimee Mann's "Wise Up." It's probably a film I will always struggle with and love in equal measure.

6. Phantom Thread (2017) - Over time and with another viewing, I could see this flip-flopping with Magnolia, or even climbing higher than that on this chart. But one thing I've heard most people say about Phantom Thread, even those who love it, is that they didn't know quite what to make of it on first viewing. Some found that a thrilling, exhilarating experience; others, alienating. I probably land closer to the second camp than the first, but a second viewing could push me closer to the first. It's been only 48 hours since I saw this, so it's fair to say that the processing phase is still going on. It's always a joy to watch Daniel-Day Lewis, and Lesley Manville deserves the praise that has been lavished on her. The person I'm not sure about -- who could be key to my affection for the movie going one way or another -- is Vicky Krieps, about whom I'd like to devote her own blog post (and may still). I find it difficult to look at her, as her performance conveys quantities of vulnerability and yearning that leave me feeling discomfited. Being discomfited in an Anderson film is often a good thing, but after the movie I described it in a text to a friend this way: "It's a handsome puzzle box that I am not all that interested in prying open." But maybe one day I will pry it.

7. The Master (2012) - After waiting patiently for five years after There Will Be Blood for another PTA film to hit theaters, it was probably inevitable I would be a little disappointed by The Master. And yet I can easily recognize this as a kind of masterwork, so to speak, as it may be Anderson's greatest technical achievement, even including There Will Be Blood. Although I think he's too modest for this, Anderson could be describing himself with this movie's title, as the film feels like kind of an arrival at an otherworldly level of cinematic mastery. And yet the film leaves me so very cold, never able to relate to either Joaquin Phoenix's Freddy Quell or Philip Seymour Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd, both of whom are performed expertly but feel kind of like empty vessels. It's easy enough to watch this film merely for surface pleasures, if that's all you can get from it, and I'm kind of afraid to say that may have been all I did get from it. I think the parasitic relationship between a shepherd and his sheep is explored in a fascinating way, but toward what purpose, I'm not quite sure. I do think I would benefit greatly from a second viewing, but then I've said that about almost every film on this list.

8. Inherent Vice (2014) - Some people say there's a great film buried somewhere within Inherent Vice, but I could not dig it out. This is the only Anderson film that gets lower than a passing grade on the star scale, as I gave it only 2.5 stars -- I was inclined to go even lower, but granted it the extra half star on account of me failing to get this movie certainly being a "me problem" on some level. My problem is I'm a bit biased against the detective movie in which the plot cannot be easily discerned, or discerned at all, Exhibit A being The Big Sleep, which I kind of can't stand. I was hoping this would strike me more like Altman's The Long Goodbye, which I do love, but I just couldn't get there. I also love Joaquin Phoenix, but he happens to appear in my two least favorite PTA movies. What are you going to do. This is the only movie on this list that I expect never to watch again, though I may be wrong about that. Certain moments do really stick with me, though, moments in which I can almost see my way through to his vision. I don't know why, but I remember this scene where Phoenix and -- Katherine Waterston, is it? -- go running through the rain to find a store that isn't there anymore. Why does that moment stick with me? I don't know, but it's got to be further evidence of Anderson's greatness as a filmmaker.

And that greatness is downright indisputable. It does sadden me that I'm writing this post in what must described as a downward trajectory in my own feelings toward Anderson, as his last three films make up the bottom three on this chart. From that you must conclude that I think Anderson is getting worse, not better.

But those films are full of daring and a total lack of convention, making Anderson feel less like a cinematic imitator and more like a maverick. We need mavericks like him around.

If anything, I think of Anderson as like Samantha in another Phoenix movie, Her. He has evolved to the point that he has progressed beyond my mere human capability of understanding him.

Which I think means he should keep right on doing exactly what he's doing, and one day, if I'm lucky, I'll catch up.

Here's to his 2020 release being my #1 of that year.

That time I chose the Australian movie over the best picture nominee

I'm not sure if it's my commitment to writing reviews, my sense of duty as a critic for an Australian publication, or just my exaggerated tendency to write off a cinematic year once my year-end list is published, but on Thursday, I watched a new Australian movie rather than the best picture nominee that had just been released.

The best picture nominee directed by a man who had once directed my #1 movie of the year, if we want to tie that in.

Yes indeed, on Thursday night, for my first trip to the movies since I closed that much-discussed year-end list, I opted for Warwick Thornton's Sweet Country over Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread.

Not something I could have imagined myself doing five years ago.

Now, there's a logistical aspect of this that must be considered as well. Sweet Country had been out for a full week already, whereas Phantom Thread was debuting that night. If I still wanted to review Sweet Country, I needed to see it now or else forfeit the opportunity. Given the way movies tend to hang around at Cinema Nova, Phantom Thread will still be playing in early April -- though Sweet Country could be too. (That doesn't help me in terms of reviewing it, though. And Nova is only supposed to let us see it with our critics card within the first two weeks of its release.)

Anyway, if I had been thinking purely as a cinephile with a bias toward cinema with the most prominence on the world stage, I would have clearly opted for Phantom Thread. I'm sure that movie benefits from being seen on the big screen, as any movie with a strong visual sense obviously does (or any movie in general does -- discuss). Anderson makes epics that need to wash over us, or should, anyway.

But in this case I was thinking as a critic who believes that potentially one of the most important Australian films in a decade needs to be reviewed on our site, and my editor is out of town (has been for a month), so he's certainly not in a position to do it.

(Of course, I was also thinking as the same list obsessive, who could add Sweet Country as my second viewing of 2018.)

Even without having seen Phantom Thread yet, I can share with you how little I am disappointed with my decision. Sweet Country is a masterpiece, one that grapples with the soul of a country that has abused its native population in a way very similar to what the U.S. has done, and has an ongoing debate about whether we should get the day off work for Australia Day, which commemorates the arrival of Europeans in Australia. Not only is it an absolute triumph in terms of filmmaking, with terrific acting, cinematography and even arthouse editing, but it's something every Australian should see.

And I hope people other than Australians will see it, giving it the relevance on the world stage that theoretically gave Phantom Thread an advantage over it. It's just finished playing at Sundance, which means American audiences are likely to eventually see it, as well they should. As well they will want to. In addition to everything else, it makes for a great western.

As for Phantom Thread ... I may still see it in the theater, I may not. I have not loved an Anderson film since my beloved There Will Be Blood, my #1 movie of 2007. With the two I've seen since then and not loved, The Master and Inherent Vice, I saw one on the big screen and one on the small. Seeing it writ large may have made me like The Master more than I would have otherwise, but I didn't like either of those movies a huge amount, so I don't know if I owe Anderson anything in terms of this one. He may need to win me back, in a way. (I did like The Master, and probably owe it a second viewing; with Inherent Vice, I think I'm done after one.)

My Sweet County review should be up on the site and linked in a couple days. Read up on it, and look for it coming to a theater near you.