[This review avoids major spoilers, especially latter half plot, but will explore themes from the plot of the film]
Firing on all cylinders, Paul Thomas Anderson delivers a 2 hour, 40 minute work of art in One Battle After Another that lays bare many current failures of the United States Of America while also compelling with a heart pounding and personal narrative.
Spanning decades, One Battle After Another offers an epic scope as PTA grounds us in what I consider to be a tale set in the “not too distant future” of America, though this isn’t specified. We meet legitimate radical leftists Bob Ferguson (Leonardo Di Caprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), along with their organized crew of revolutionaries, The French 75, as they execute a raid to free immigrant detainees. This isn’t a story about the extremely online or social media activism, with barely a computer in sight. These are soldiers; on the streets and underground, fighting a full on war. Our current administration is also never named explicitly, which was likely quite intentional, as the story is broader in scope than that, exploring what a true war between autocracy and democracy would look like in a society just a few years down the road from our own.
Much of what will play out over this sharply told tale is seeded in this first act. We come to understand Perfidia to be a complex character, turned on by her power and political passion, but burdened and bewildered by motherhood when Willa (Chase Infiniti) arrives. Bob is radically committed to the cause and deeply in love with Perfidia, but is forced to go deep underground with Willa after Perfidia and other members of The French 75 are captured, and coordinated plans of action for going underground are set in motion. The French 75 are scrappy and organized, but the police state as personified by Sean Penn’s remarkable embodiment of Col. Stephen J. Lockjaw are deeply resourced and relentless in their pursuit.
Most likely best described as a thriller, One Battle After Another lays out all of this important groundwork urgently and propulsively, and then transports us 16 years into the future, when Lockjaw’s search for Bob and Willa reignites and the years have taken their toll on everyone, most especially Bob, who supplements compassionate and paranoid single fatherhood with copious weed and alcohol usage.
The title of the film feels profound and apt as alluding not simply to the journey of our characters, fighting a literal war for freedom, but also parenthood and the unrelenting quest of keeping our children safe. Or perhaps even more broadly, the title and film explores what it means to exist; to eke purpose and meaning out of the one sacred life we each fleetingly hold, and how we must fight over and over again to live with conviction. That might sound like a stretch, or overly sincere, but Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a thrilling and accessible story here with complicated characters in a fraught world, and infused it with humor, heart, and sincerity, while also unflinchingly depicting the consequences of our current political decline. It’s a staggering piece of filmmaking at the highest level, will undoubtedly be a major awards contender, and will spark significant debate and discussion; all of this from a massively budgeted Warner Brothers studio film that’s largely an auteur created original work (though inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland).
The performances and character work here are complex and award-worthy. DiCaprio’s Bob is all of us: at once capable, committed, and courageous, and simultaneously barely holding it together as a father who’s trying to raise a kid right in a broken world where they’re legitimately on the lamb. But after 16 years Willa is beginning to simply believe her Dad to be a paranoid burnout. Infiniti’s Willa is a remarkable teenager as well. A martial arts practitioner at a dojo run by Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, she just wants to hang out with friends and be a normal girl, but like John Connor in the Terminator films, she’s been raised to be ready for anything, and when Lockjaw comes for her, she locks in for a battle she was skeptical would ever come. St. Carlos is a fascinating character, who runs a dojo but also has a bit of a “Latino Harriet Tubman thing” going on. When Bob and Willa need his help, he’s not put out or terrified. He’s spent his whole life living this police state reality and calmly and coolly enacts a plan as the police industrial complex reins down on their town. Del Toro’s performance is supporting, but important, as he infuses humor and cool and competence and heart into a tale that is as entertaining as it is profound.
And then there’s Sean Penn as Col. Lockjaw. Perhaps the performance of Penn’s lifetime, Lockjaw is a loathsome man, but also a pitiable one. Penn’s physicality is matched only by the writing, which establishes a complex portrait of what it means to be the top dog of a police state. Lockjaw’s battle is personal. As he wields the full weight of the federal police and grasps tightly to his straight, white, American power… he’s also got a weakness for Black women. It’s a weakness he’s willing to indulge as he encounters Perfidia in the opening raid of the film. And that weakness will haunt him, as in the circles he runs in (powerful, racist, and almost comically conspiratorially committed), that might be among the gravest of sins. Lockjaw craves power, acceptance, and freedom and even as he finds it, is lauded with praise for his takedown of The French 75, and gains access to the most elite and clandestine halls of power… he’s only ever one false step away from the banishment and dehumanization he so readily inflicts on others. Anderson here isn’t so much sympathizing with fascists, but rather exposing the lie that their power and authority does anything other than to further separate them from their own humanity and freedom. Any flaw in the tight-assed, tooth-grinding, straight White American Lockjaw could be his undoing; there is no freedom to be found on his swaggering-but-terrified path.
But deep down at the core of One Battle After Another, there’s profound humanity and relatability depicted. There’s a father trying desperately and to the best of his ability to protect his child. There’s a child coming up in a hideously deformed world, coming into her own and learning to fight for herself and decide for herself who she is going to be. And what more compelling drama or thrilling action is there than a fight to save those that we love? As unflinchingly political and ambitious as One Battle After Another is, it’s also emotionally grounded and entertainingly executed. The final acts are nothing less than bravura action filmmaking, with a car chase scene unlike anything I’ve ever seen, and featuring legitimate action that thrills as much as it tugs at your heart and mind.
We’re absolutely inundated by social, digital, and televised media today. We’re confused, paralyzed, and overwhelmed as a society. Mankind simply hasn’t figured out how to organize and function with the level of interconnectivity and algorithm that is upon us whether we know it or not. Radical social posts and radicalized news networks talk a big game and we struggle to integrate our day to day lives with what we know to be happening all around the world. Into that milieu, Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t simply Tweet. Rather, he uses the full force of his considerable creative power to craft a film that truly has something to say in a cogent, compelling package. It’s a film that brings the full power of all that filmmaking can and should be, and shoots it right onto thousands of silver screens across the world. It’s presumptuous to assume that one film will “make a difference” or change the course of our declining democracy. But One Battle After Another is a clarion call nonetheless, one perhaps wrapped in a mass marketable package filled with movie stars and filmmaking flare, but speaking with clarity on the future we face if we don’t fight fiercely for human rights and power to the people. Viva la revolution, indeed.
And I’m Out.
