Not contesting your opinion, to each his own. Just some additional thoughts:
One thing I really liked about Woodcock vs the megalomaniacs Plainview and Dodd was that there seemed to be actual stakes limiting Woodcock’s selfishness. In There Will Be Blood and The Master, the characters exhibit the prowess they hold in their minds through monologues or grand actions (standing on and hammering a railroad stake through a table, relaying an embellished story about wrestling a dragon), but there’s less actually pushing up against them in these moments. These are large overtures for large overtures sake rather than a need to dominate something else in the scene. Salesmanship and theater. To put it another way: if the characters didn’t act this way, nothing story-wise would change. I know this is a bit of a false equivalency because Plainview has Eli to contend with in terms of furthering his oil enterprise, and Dodd has a growing base of followers, or not, but what I'm trying to say is that the stakes of domination in those scenes are not as central to the plot as I think they are in Phantom Thread. Phantom Thread seems the inverse where dressmaking is an incidental profession, a symbol of the artist's life, but it serves more to create an engine for the hierarchical interpersonal relationships, which are the real meat of the film.
Reynolds’ lack of accountability nearly costs him one of the most monied patrons of the House of Woodcock, and he has to swallow his pride temporarily in order to operate in reciprocity with the world. At the dinner party scene, when Alma’s seated next to the man who invites them to the New Year’s Eve party, he attempts to sell her on it by saying it’ll be the “the time of her life.” Alma responds challengingly “How do you know what my life has been?” and the man says plainly, “I don’t. But I think you’ll have a very fine time.” This grounded reaction is in sharp contrast to all other conversations in the film, which can only be approached by Woodcock as battles to be won or lost. It reminded me of the moment in The Master when Dodd is confronted by the apartment gathering attendee who questions whether or not The Cause has the makings of a cult, but here that foil is deflected and buried more invisibly by having the contrasting conversation take place second-hand through another character. You still see the difference in humility but it’s not as bluntly in your face as before.
So the emotional transactions felt more literally like transactions to me here than in the past, where there had been a lot more telling and expository dialogue moving things along in linear fashion. Phantom Thread felt structurally more like a spiral that deepens as the story moves forward. That seemed like a real evolution in his writing, to me.
I’d taken this post down because I didn’t want to steer this thread into an uninteresting debate about which of his films are better, but do think that the movies he's made previously help illuminate where this one's heartbeat lies.
