The Only Daniel Day-Lewis Movie That Has A Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Score
If you took a poll of movie lovers and asked for a list of the best actors of the past 50 years, Daniel Day-Lewis would certainly be among them — he may even occupy the number one slot. The versatile performer has been wowing audiences with his all-in, committed performance style for decades, and legends are legion about the lengths to which he'll go to immerse himself in his characters.
But only one of his films has a perfect 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, and it's somewhat surprising: It's not "Gangs of New York," "My Left Foot," or even "In the Name of the Father," but 1985's "A Room With a View," directed by James Ivory. Set in the early 1900s, the film follows a young Englishwoman named Lucy (Helena Bonham Carter) and her chaperone (Maggie Smith) on a trip to Italy, where she ignites a brief relationship with a man (Julian Sands). When she returns to England and her stuffy fiancé (Day-Lewis), she's surprised to discover that the man has reason to spend time nearby in England, throwing her life into upheaval as she's forced to choose between the two gents.
I saw the film for the first time a few years ago, and while I thought the end result was somewhat sleepy, Day-Lewis is admittedly terrific as the wonderfully named Cecil Vyse, a wealthy man who is extremely snobbish and whose prim and proper attributes are the exact opposite of the passionate nature of Lucy's other suitor. His pompous attitude gives the film much of its humor, and seeing him interact with Helena Bonham Carter's protagonist is certainly one of the best aspects of the movie.
There's just one problem.
Rotten Tomatoes is wrong about Daniel Day-Lewis's best movie
I'll give 'em one thing: Rotten Tomatoes has been spectacular at branding. They've somehow convinced the general public that the Tomatometer score should be the end-all, be-all answer of whether or not a film is worth watching (and we may have Roger Ebert to blame for that). Of course, an awful lot of nuance is lost in the frequently misunderstood creation of that score — so much that we've argued in the past that Rotten Tomatoes is a huge contributor to the downfall of film criticism. (And don't forget about the fact that some Rotten Tomatoes scores have been artificially manipulated.)
In this case, yes, "A Room With a View" does technically have the highest-rated score of any Daniel Day-Lewis film. But since the film came out in 1985, long before the invention of the internet, that particular score is aggregated from only 35 reviews — most of which were published in the 2000s as retrospectives looking back at the movie. That makes comparing its Tomatometer number to more modern films like "Phantom Thread" or "Lincoln" — which have a comparatively huge 358 reviews and 290 reviews, respectively — significantly more complicated. With a much higher number of critics weighing in on more modern entries in any filmography, there are naturally more opportunities for deviation from what Rotten Tomatoes considers to be "fresh."
After just having rewatched Paul Thomas Anderson's "There Will Be Blood" for the first time since I saw it in theaters, I was blown away all over again by the staggering, towering performance Day-Lewis gives in it. I think a legitimate case could be made that it's among the best performances of all time — and the rest of the film around it is pretty damn great, too. That movie currently has a 91% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, aggregated from 246 reviews. So is "A Room With a View," with its 100% rating from 35 critics, a "better" film than "There Will Be Blood"? No amount of number-crunching will ever be able to definitively determine something that subjective — and I hope you'll join me in embracing the grey area where all the nuance lives.