Review: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

 by Rob DiCristino

¡Viva la revolución!

There’s nothing sexier than a project, right? Watching your person in their element, seeing them get activated by something that stimulates their industry and creativity is, as far as I’m concerned, a more powerful aphrodisiac than anything a doctor could possibly prescribe. That also seems to be the case for Bob Ferguson* (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), members of a militant group of revolutionaries who commit acts of righteous terror along the U.S./Mexico border. Bombing banks and liberating ICE camps are basically their foreplay, so it’s only a matter of time before Perfidia gets pregnant. Motherhood isn’t in the cards for this acid-tongued badass, though, so when she’s finally apprehended by Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she makes a deal to save her own skin. This betrayal makes fugitives out of Bob and little Willa (played as a teen by Chase Infiniti), and when we catch up with them sixteen years later, Bob has lost himself to booze and weed, sheltering Willa from smartphones, Wi-Fi, and anything else that might compromise their peace.

So begins Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a hilarious, chaotic, and endlessly engrossing odyssey loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland. In transposing Pynchon’s Reagan-era (era), anti-fascist story to the present day — the near future, actually, if we consider the sixteen-year time skip — Anderson shines a spotlight on a frustrating reality: Very little has actually changed. The police state persists, personified by Lockjaw, a ridiculous, jack-booted caricature whose sexual obsession with Perfidia exposes the hypocrisy of race nationalism — literally, as Lockjaw’s grandest desire is to be accepted into a secret society of polo-wearing Nazis led by Tony Goldwyn — and raises questions as to Willa’s parentage. The brutalization of immigrants continues, as well, as Lockjaw sends his armored goons to occupy sanctuary cities as a pretense for hunting Willa down. Luckily, the migrant locals have allies like Karate sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who runs an underground railroad that keeps them safe from harm.

But while aging soldiers like Sergio and Deandra (Regina Hall, whose character resents Perfidia for turning coat) have continued to fight the good fight, Bob’s political idealism has decayed into a kind of crotchety, couch-potato paranoia: He berates Willa’s history teacher about her curriculum and watches The Battle of Algiers in his bathrobe after seeing her off to a school dance, itself an exercise in autonomy that he only allows after she promises to bring along her tracking device. Even so, we get the sense that the whip-smart Willa has been humoring her father on these scores for years, almost as if letting him play the capable patriarch is a serviceable substitute for actually being one. It’s only after a government crackdown upends their tacit equilibrium — Deandra rescues Willa before she’s apprehended, triggering the cat-and-mouse game that makes up the rest of the film — that Willa sees the value of her father’s tutelage and comes face-to-face with the genuine, real-life villains that she’d always considered to be figments of his drug-addled imagination.

As Bob and Willa’s journey toward reunion unfolds — one wild, slapstick, blisteringly tense battle after another — it becomes clear that Anderson’s title refers not just to the endless pursuit of social equity and economic justice, but to the lifetime of insecurity and terror that comes with parenthood. As Bob, Leonardo DiCaprio affects a stunning combination of self-awareness and befuddlement, one that will be painfully familiar to anyone doing their best to raise confident, ambitious, and empathetic children in a world that seems hell-bent on crushing them into callous consumers of soulless rubbish. DiCaprio’s revelatory performance — which hits a Rick Dalton-esque peak when Bob castigates a comrade who won’t give him crucial information until he recalls a decades-old code word — would make One Battle After Another an instant classic all on its own, but it’s supporting turns from Sean Penn’s exquisitely preposterous Lockjaw and Chase Infiniti’s fearless Willa that give it the nuance and texture befitting a generational talent like Paul Thomas Anderson.

Anderson is hardly content to rest on those laurels, however, as One Battle After Another is a visual wonder unlike anything else in his not-inconsiderable filmography. The director of Magnolia and Phantom Thread has always known how to set the stage for a bravura acting performance, sure — how to wield his camera like a scalpel scraping away at the gritty depths of the human condition — but there’s a kineticism to Bob’s hapless trek across One Battle that is both playful and exhilarating, a lightness of spirit and confidence of execution that finds a satisfying balance between Licorice Pizza’s saccharine nostalgia and Inherent Vice’s enigmatic whimsy. Though it runs nearly three hours in length, One Battle is nonetheless a breathless viewing experience, one that builds to a stomach-churning car chase that demands to be seen in a large format. It’s hard to believe that a PTA film would be one of the premiere IMAX spectacles of a year that boasted blockbusters like Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps, but PTA has never exactly played by the rules, has he?

And thank goodness for that. Like One Battle After Another’s grizzled, world-weary revolutionaries — Oh, I would be remiss if I ended this review without mentioning Shayna McHayle’s electric “Junglepussy” and a blink-or-you’ll-miss-her cameo from Alana Haim — Anderson must be starting to feel like the last of a dying breed, one of a small band of stalwarts still carrying the banner of Gen X independence. It’s almost funny to think that a rebellious spirit such as his would achieve (arguably) its ultimate apotheosis with a film about the perils of middle age, a story about how hard it can be to keep the fires of defiance burning when you’ve got bills to pay and mouths to feed. Films like One Battle After Another are proof that wisdom is more powerful than knowledge, that sincerity is more rewarding than cynicism, and that just because our parents fumble to figure out their iPhone cameras and properly address our non-binary friends, that doesn't mean they don’t have a thing or two to teach us about how to properly rage against the goddamn, motherfucking machine.

One Battle After Another hits U.S. theaters on Friday, September 26th.

* “Bob” and “Willa” are cover identities, but that’s what they’re called for most of the movie, so I’m using those names here.