“We learned punk rock in Hollywood.” – Minutemen
Film culture feels at times like it’s reached a dead end in the Letterboxd generation, cinephilia no longer a niche within but a prerequisite for engaging with it. The zeitgeist shows occasional signs of life, to be sure — Barbenheimer’s rousing critical and commercial success in 2023 shines as a bright example — but largely it’s squirming on the operating table. Movie lovers mostly just talk amongst ourselves, shuffling aimlessly into oblivion as we ratchet the hype machine to a higher and higher — almost inaudible — pitch with each passing year to compensate for the lack of something substantial to chew on. All the while, social media pull quotes have supplanted the critical review, seats aren’t filled unless the movie is billed as a must-see IMAX spectacle, and meme-speak rules the advertising space. A filmmaker might ask, why even bother? But as audience members, we must retort in kind: give us something to care about. Where are the screen artists willing to stare directly into the maw of our moment? Is Ari Aster the only one? Seriously?
Look out! Helter Skelter! Here comes Paul Thomas Anderson, granted carte blanche to break contemporary moviegoing out of its stubborn hermeticism — however briefly. For so long, Anderson has postured as Hollywood’s enfante terrible, hanging with the cool kids and biting off references from Altman to Demme, Gallo to Scorsese. Now he wants to kick it with the normies, and it’s mind-blowing how far he’s straining not to be white elephant. Anderson sucks his gut in and fits snugly into the clothes of yesteryear’s blockbuster with One Battle After Another, that thing you saw as a kid which made you believe movies could be warm and inviting and also dance at the edge of the possible. It’s equal parts 17 Again and Apocalypse Now.
We open on Perfidia Beverly Hills — a ferocious Teyana Taylor, fresh off her breakout performance in A Thousand and One and holding the whole entire world in the palm of her hand — a left-wing revolutionary strutting confidently into an immigration detention center to liberate it. Perfidia is basically the protagonist of the movie’s extended cold open, and Anderson uses her as a prism through which to examine love, sex, politics, and their intimate intertwining. A pseudonymous Leonardo DiCaprio (Rocket Man, Ghetto Pat, pick your favorite) shows up as the Robin to her Batman — wickedly proficient with mechanics yet cutting a goofy and effete figure — later to assume the identity of Bob Ferguson.
One Battle After Another is the widest canvas Anderson has painted on by a fair margin, and he relishes the opportunity to spread the love; he nods toward action movie titans Christopher Nolan and Michael Mann within minutes. If you’re one of the people who misses the (comparatively) grounded thrills of The Dark Knight and Heat, Anderson has heard you. The opening here is a massive Akira-sized amalgamation of ’90s and 2000s thrillers: it moves so fast and grasps its urgency so tightly that we hardly get to know any of its characters at all, but we’re so caught up in the espirit de corps that it hardly matters.
Yet as with all noble causes, the orgiastic revolutionary action must reach a bitter end. Perfidia gets caught at the end of an insane car chase (not the last — and not the best — the movie has to offer), and the tables of power turn on her: “I can give you the embrace of the federal government,” Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn, the best he’s been since The Tree of Life, doing a great Elmer Fudd-meets-Steven Crowder) purrs at her bedside. Nowhere to run, she turns fink, and is welcomed into the mainstream.
Anderson ends the sequence with one of the greatest transitions he’s yet delivered: a deep look into a baby’s eyes — Willa, Perfidia and Bob’s daughter — holding a makeshift trust device in her tiny hands, followed by a gasp-inducing 16-year jump in a hard cut set to an almighty needle drop. The movie then slows to merely a breakneck pace, and more directly concerns Bob and Willa, left behind in the fictional northern California town of Baktan Cross to live out the rest of their days in the shadow of Perfidia’s betrayal.
There’s a subtly haunted quality to a lot of the images in One Battle After Another. Anderson is playing his yacht rock album, reprising hits from across his entire filmmaking career, but the cozy warmth of familiarity is suffused with an essential anxiety about the march of time. On side A, you’ve got Inherent Vice-inspired dissolves and ellipses. Side B gives us some of Punch-Drunk Love’s jangly expressionism. As a bonus track, we’re treated to dusks and rockfaces reminiscent of The Master’s archetypal power. Anderson stuns with his fiercely modern application of the archaic VistaVision format, yet so much of the story is so tightly focused on long-forgotten cryptic codes and the use of old technologies that there’s a pervasive sense the purer, more classical filmmaking Anderson grew up on — his filmmaking — is a thing of the past. But Anderson won’t just lie down and take a dirt nap. As good old Jimmy Gator, dying game show host from Magnolia, reminds us: “We may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us.”
Lockjaw, angling for a spot in top-secret white supremacist organization the Christmas Adventurer’s Club, returns from out of the crisscrossing metal pipes of American military bureaucracy to hunt down Willa, who disappears and may or may not be his daughter from a series of charged affairs with Perfidia nearly two decades ago. From there, Anderson unleashes a sprawling bombardment of upheaval on Baktan Cross. It has both Looney Tunes-level carnage and Minutemen-level burrowing into the particulars of the colorful, irrepressible — mostly immigrant — California working class which make the state great.
It’s during this extraordinary, bursting, about-to-spill-onto-the-street middle section that DiCaprio delivers some of his best ever work, because his best work has always been physical. True, he’s got the melt-your-heart movie star eyes, but it’s when he’s channeling the Marx Brothers that his talent shines brightest, and he gets to do some incredible pratfalls here. Slowly, however, he recedes into the background, sidelined in favor of the more active role Willa plays in her own salvation.
For Pynchon nuts, the change-up might sound familiar. One Battle After Another is an identifiable and worthy variation on Vineland — streamlining its otherwise impossible-to-adapt stoner ponderousness and remixing its Reagan-era critique for a post-Trump, racialized political landscape. It holds the weight of American history lightly, like a glowing roach it’s about to flick onto the sidewalk, and goes as far as self-immolation, interrogating whiteness and sacrificing Bob on the altar of passive protagonists. Structurally and thematically, the move closely resembles Mad Max: Fury Road — not bad company to keep — but Anderson takes it a step further than Miller did, abdicating his white male privilege entirely and handing the wheel over not to an established Hollywood legend but a fresh-faced, mixed-race up-and-coming star.
In a close possible world, a more just world, a One Battle After Another — a movie willing to put its finger on the throbbing, bulging pulse of American culture and politics in a commercial and accessible way — comes out every three weeks and plays at every multiplex in the nation. It’s full and immediate and funny and irreverent, and it never for a moment loses sight of its humanity. God Lord, one thinks by its conclusion, let it not be the last of its kind. But if it is, that’s okay. Anderson, for his part, seems to have made his peace with it: the movie closes on Willa, hopping in her car to a song inextricable from the fabric of American culture. The gesture brings the subtext up to the roiling surface — One Battle After Another is a last hurrah for monoculture, and a celebration of the miracle of miscegenation. Said progeny shall inherit the earth.
DIRECTOR: Paul Thomas Anderson; CAST: Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor; DISTRIBUTOR: Warner Bros. Pictures; IN THEATERS: September 26; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 41 min.
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