‘Phantom Thread’ & Misunderstanding Autism for Personality

Paul Thomas Anderson may be 21st-century cinema’s best writer of complex male characters and the intrinsic and destructive nature of egotism, and his penchant for such characters, whether you agree with the superlative, infects 2017’s Phantom Thread, about a middle-aged dressmaker named Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) — a brilliant, perfectionistic, demanding, ornery, stubborn man who appears to fit tidily into the aforementioned bucket. And he does, to a degree, but nowhere near as tidily as canon egocentrics Dean Trumbell, Daniel Plainview, Lancaster Dodd, or Jack Horner; unlike them, Reynolds is low-spectrum (“high-functioning”) autistic, and many of his behaviors which could be attributable to egotism are actually — and independently — autistic ones.