REVIEW: ‘One Battle After Another’ opens a new front you need to explore
Leonardo DiCaprio stars in One Battle After Another, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
Any movie about contemporary politics walks a fine line. How do you incorporate a message into your movie without seeming preachy? How do you lighten the experience with comedy or action without trivializing the heavier themes? Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another may eventually become a crucial text for striking this balance. It layers together ideas about immigration, lawful protest, terrorism, and family into a singularly moving whole, all while finding time to entertain with action sequences, slapstick, and sharply funny dialogue.
This is a movie that across its 2 hours and 41 minutes features a noxious white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers, a snarling Sean Penn character who walks like he has a branding iron permanently stuck up his ass, and an uncomfortably high Leonardo DiCaprio arguing over revolutionary code words with a comrade. And somehow, on top of it all, we get a striking multigenerational story about a family caught up in fighting for what’s right, told with a kind of prescience about the current state of America that will be marveled at for a long time to come. As a socially conscious neo-Western, it’s almost exactly the kind of movie Ari Aster’s Eddington tried – and failed – to be.
The “protagonist” (more on that later) is Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), a bombmaker working for a left-wing terrorist group called the French 75. Naming a terror group after a cocktail? We’re already off on a good foot. Bob’s girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is in the group too, and together they blow up banks and power grids, never hurting anyone but spreading their message around the lesser-known corners of California. Soon, they have a daughter together, but Perfidia is afraid of settling down and losing her edge as a revolutionary. It’s not long before she slips up during a bank robbery, and the French 75 are forced to go to ground.
Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills.
16 years later, Bob and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) have been hiding out in Baktan Cross, a “sanctuary city” that serves as a waypoint on a latter-day underground railroad for undocumented immigrants. Bob’s gotten soft, losing himself to cannabis and alcohol, but that’s exactly when the Army colonel (Penn), who’s been pursuing them since the glory days of the French 75, gets a lead that puts him hot on Bob and Willa’s trail. And let me tell you, you’ve never seen a human male sanctimoniously waddle like Penn does when he’s on the hunt.
“Original” films like One Battle After Another – yes, it’s loosely based on a Thomas Pynchon novel, stay with me here – are considered the new holy grail of cinephiles. In a film industry that values preexisting intellectual property over anything else, the thinking goes that if you can bring an established fanbase to a movie, you get an instant multiplier on your investment. So the last decade or so has seen fewer and fewer studio releases based on original ideas, and if those films get made at all, it’s because a studio is trying to burnish its artistic cred after raking in money on more commercial-friendly fare.
As a viewer, IP gives you a shortcut. You may already know the characters from some other work, even if you’re merely familiar with them from being a general part of pop culture. In an original film, you need to watch more closely, and learn what you can about the world of the story as you go. One Battle After Another is very much the latter, but it’s just one of the aspects that make it one of the most rewarding things to see this year.
It takes skill to disperse information about a plot or characters throughout a long-ish movie like this without resorting to a screenwriting crutch like an exposition dump. But the overall effect of the slow drip is profound. Slowly, we learn about the structure of the French 75, their super-cautious methods and the shape of the world they operate in. When we catch up with Bob and Willa years later, their network still exists, but there are also other less-organized groups doing their bit to fight against the American political and military machine. These activists may not know the code words or share the violent tactics of the French 75, but they have their own ways of evading capture by the authorities. It gives the movie a lived-in quality, inviting you to explore it for a while.
Sean Penn as Col. Steven Lockjaw.
On paper, Bob might be the main character, but as other critics have noted, it’s more a function of how much screen time DiCaprio has. The story of the movie isn’t strictly about him, and it’s more of an ensemble piece. That’s how we get so much runtime devoted to Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw, a profoundly racist but baffling creature who lusts after Black women while wanting to murder every revolutionary he sees. Lockjaw obsessively wants to be admitted to the quasi-Illuminati club with the festive name (“All hail Saint Nick!”), but his stalking and eventual sexual coercion of Perfidia is an obstacle to membership. This sets up the final confrontation between Willa, Lockjaw and Bob, but it also leaves you with a chill once the credits roll. Kooky name aside, there’s a nagging feeling that groups like the Christmas Adventurers might really exist.
It might sound hyperbolic or naive, but the overall experience of watching One Battle After Another is just as rich as peering into Middle Earth or the Star Wars galaxy for the first time, except with a more direct connection to our current lives. Amid the desperate and frightening scenes, and the flawed characters, there’s a sense of hope to be gleaned from the movie. There’s nothing else quite like it, and I expect we’ll be noticing new things in it for years to come. Viva la revolución!
One Battle After Another gets four stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
You get a taste of it in the trailers, but Jonny Greenwood’s score is perfectly calibrated to the tone of the movie.
Benecio Del Toro does so much with a relatively small role as Sergio St. Carlos, a martial arts instructor and people smuggler.
Is this the movie that gets me into Thomas Pynchon?