Dunkirk [68 points / 11 votes]
Second place:
And the winner is...
Phantom Thread [223 points / 31 votes]
"The first sounds that we hear at the beginning of Phantom Thread are a series of ominous, sustained chords played by heavy strings and a soft, foreign-accented female voice: 'Reynolds has made my dreams come true, and I have given him what he desires most in return: every piece of me.' The screen has faded in on a close-up of Alma (Vicky Krieps), illuminated by firelight and looking as inscrutable as those chords sound. Are we about to see a love story? A thriller? Then, as the film lapses into flashback to introduce us to Alma’s other half, the imperious couturier Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), the music shifts into a warmer, lusher key—a rippling piano melody reminiscent of Bill Evans. These two music cues are reflective of Phantom Thread’s competing but complementary tones. The rest of the film swings back and forth from dark comedy to romantic thriller and back to comedy again under the dual orchestration of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and composer Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood’s score—his fourth collaboration with Anderson—reportedly comprises some seventy percent of Phantom Thread’s running time. It acts as a key element of the film’s darkly elegant tone and yet never becomes oppressive or overbearing. It has already been named one of the best film scores of the twenty-first century, one of two Greenwood scores to have that distinction.
"Greenwood’s previous scores for Anderson’s films have been pricklier, more violent: recall the stabbing. punching strings of his music for There Will Be Blood, inspired by Penderecki, or the slow-churning, sea-sick tones of The Master. The score for Phantom Thread is more outwardly conventional; Anderson told Greenwood he wanted something 'romantic,' inspired by mid-century jazz and light-orchestral music by Billy Strayhorn and Nelson Riddle. (Dense, moody orchestrations of the jazz standards 'My Foolish Heart' and 'My Ship,' arranged by Riddle for his 1963 album with Oscar Peterson, underscore two other early scenes.) There are also echoes here of Glenn Gould’s Bach recordings and Bernard Herrmann’s Hitchcock scores, a fitting influence given the film’s playful references to Rebecca, Psycho, and Vertigo. But Greenwood’s score has its own distinct voice even as it borrows generously from this range of influences, just as the film itself recombines an eclectic variety of sources—Hitchcock and Kubrick, M.R. James and Henry James, David Lean’s The Passionate Friends and Albert Brooks’ Modern Romance—into something absolutely original.
"Those mysterious chords at the beginning of the film associate Alma with string instruments; the shimmering 'House of Woodcock' theme that follows associates Reynolds with piano. In his ominous 'Phantom Thread' theme, which creeps into the film later and is used to underscore its scenes of subtly deployed violence, Greenwood brings together piano and violin as if to suggest a symbolic duet for these opposites-attract lovers. (Greenwood’s use of piano here has an English-baroque inflection that correlates with Reynolds’ formality, while the violin adds a vaguely Eastern-European or Jewish flavor—a hint, perhaps, to Alma’s shadowy foreign origins.) This theme plays no less than three times in a row, to maniacal effect, during the film’s climactic scene between Reynolds and Alma, a variation on the emotionally intense showdowns (between Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday, Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dodd, Doc Sportello and Bigfoot Bjornsen) that have ended each of Anderson’s previous three features. Its repetition calls to mind the nearly obsessive use of Handel’s 'Sarabande' throughout the final act of Barry Lyndon. Then in the final moments of the film it resolves back into the cascading notes of the 'House of Woodcock' theme, just as the combative tension between our lovers resolves into something very close to marital bliss. These final flourishes of Greenwood’s score, as voluptuous as a poison flower in bloom, make such a resolution feel nothing short of magical—the perfect note on which to end this most perverse of fairy tales." ~ Ian Scott Todd
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