One Battle After Another
It’s been over a month since I’ve written a review, partly due to a job search but mostly due to overwhelm at the state of the world. My last was for Eddington, a film I enjoyed for its chaos more than for its ability to stoke any sort of optimism about the future. In the month following I’ve seen snuff on social media, dumb and dangerous shit escaping the mouths of world leaders, further division between the far-right and “radical left” and genocide continued in plain sight. At the precise moment that I needed a break from the shitshow (and perhaps a smidgeon of hope) along comes One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s emboldening action thriller (comedy?) about forgetting passwords and remembering to fight the good fight.
It’s a 162-minute film that goes by in a flash and packs laughs, tension, car chases, conservative cabals and the trials of modern parenting into a plot that’s often absurd on paper but makes total sense in-person. It’ll make you laugh in the face of ICE raids and cry at an auditory countersign. It’ll make you skeptical of Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas songs and appreciative of karate. But more than anything, One Battle After Another will make you glad that you went to the cinema while you still have the right to do so.
Leonardo DiCaprio stars in his PTA debut as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun of the French 75 – a far-left revolutionary group that rescues immigrants from detention centres and bombs political offices and banks. Through his position as ‘explosives guy’ Pat meets and falls in love with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a charismatic and temperamental woman who comes from a long line of revolutionaries. She’s the kind to do target practice in an open field with an assault rifle while nine months pregnant because it makes her feel like Tony Montana, while Pat is the kind to realise too late that all the things he found attractive in Perfidia as a wild lover are, shockingly, things that might not make her the best wife and mother.
Their love story is of the Bonnie and Clyde variety – if Bonnie and Clyde had a kid together, then Bonnie shirked her parenting duties and left Clyde to raise the baby. Rejecting motherhood frees Perfidia up for more revolutionary activities; alas, she does what Perfidia does and takes things a bit too far, attracting the attention and retaliation of the far-left’s mortal enemies.
Enter the camo-clad Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn at his absolute best), a hard-on-immigrants GI bastard with an Aryan mop who, while on the hunt for the French 75, finds himself curiously infatuated with Perfidia. Things come to a head and Lockjaw squashes the revolution, forcing many of the French 75 into hiding (or the grave) and Pat and his daughter into new identities as Bob and Willa Ferguson.
And 16 years later, this is where the film really begins. A perpetually stoned and paranoid Bob now lives off-grid with Willa (Chase Infiniti), who exudes all the traits of her mother and butts heads with her overprotective father. When Lockjaw returns and Willa goes missing, Bob must find his fight again – but not before he remembers an old code word! Bureaucracy comes for us all, even retired revolutionaries.
There are too many things to praise about One Battle After Another – the pacing, the comedy, the action, how it looks, how it feels – but I’ll start with the easiest, which is the sure hand of its writer, director and producer. As there is only one Paul Thomas Anderson feature that I haven’t seen (his first, Hard Eight) I feel confident in saying that, by body of work, he is one of the greatest directors of the last 30 years and One Battle After Another solidifies this take.
His focus and confidence inspires his casts (ensemble or otherwise) to bring their absolute best – from Daniel Day-Lewis and Phillip Seymour Hoffman types to the smaller names starring opposite them – and the same is true for this film. Every single performance in One Battle After Another, whether major or minor, is stellar.
Gone is the larger than life Leo of The Wolf of Wall Street and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, replaced by a more considered and realistic depiction of a guy who used to be part of something but who retreated from society long ago. Benicio del Toro and Regina Hall both bring an essential level of calm and trustworthiness to their characters, embodying the mentor role for both Bob and Willa respectively. Teyana Taylor is impossible to look away from as the fearless and reckless Perfidia, chewing up the scenery with glee. Chase Infiniti plays it perfectly as her daughter, both innocent and capable in her own way but at heart, a teenager at odds with her dad’s views. And where would the film be without its gloriously complex villain Lockjaw, embodied by Sean Penn in a standout performance that made me disgusted, fascinated and even, at times, supportive of his twisted and highly unserious pursuits.
Outside the players and the master puppeteer, the film also looks and sounds incredible. Cinematographer Michael Bauman (who shot Licorice Pizza) used 35 mm film on VistaVision cameras, really making the most of the wide shots and the rolling car chase scene through the sticks. Frequent PTA collaborator Jonny Greenwood returns for the film’s score, creating an aural odyssey that includes an inspired take on The Wizard of Oz’s ‘Wicked Witch Theme’ during the film’s climax. The film’s overall use of spaces – hidden and very much out in the open – make the journey feel that much more like a cat and mouse caper; while the events it depicts might not be real, there’s certainly an America where they could exist.
Regina Hall recounts seeing one scene in the script described simply as “chaos TBD” and what’s amazing about One Battle After Another is how miraculously it doesn’t descend into chaos. Yes, the characters’ pursuits are in conflict and yes, some of them veer off into the absurd. But there’s an inner logic that makes it all make sense while remaining wildly entertaining for the viewer. If Eddington was a chaotic lament to times of unity and the stupid fights we’ve had since Covid then One Battle After Another is an ode to hope and the worthwhile fights to come. Perhaps that’s why it works better.
The final thing to say is that the timing of the film’s release could not be more prescient. Inspired by the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (PTA’s second venture in adapting Pynchon), One Battle After Another is a film that the writer-director had been trying to make for some 20 years. Knowing it would be a hard text to directly adapt, he instead “stole the parts that really resonated with me and started putting all these ideas together.”
Since the book is set in the 80s with flashbacks to the 60s, it seems a curious twist of fate that its subject matter – rebellion against “fascistic Nixonian repression” – would be so unfortunately resonant today. One Battle After Another comes out during a peak in political division worldwide but particularly in the US, where rights are being stripped away from citizens and the country is experiencing inflammatory episodes almost weekly. If the film doesn’t create revolutionaries out of normal, non-extremist people, it will at the very least spark conversation.
Verdict
☆☆☆☆☆
One Battle After Another is in cinemas now. Do yourself a favour and go see it immediately.
