“One Battle After Another” has frequently been described as writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson’s first action movie, and that proves true in more ways than one. It is an action movie in the genre sense, packed with car chases and cartoon-like stunts, even a Tom Cruise name-drop, while being propelled with such a dynamic camera and kinetic pace that its two-hours-and-fifty-minutes seem to last an hour, tops, a movie as one virtual headlong rush. But this breakneck tempo also innately feeds into “One Battle After Another’s” larger idea as a movie about the desperation, folly, necessity, recklessness, hopelessness, and hope of
taking action. “If it does not seem that those words should be strung together,” Roger Ebert once wrote of another
instant classic, “perhaps that is because movies do not very often reflect the full range of human life.”
The opening sequence does not so much draw back a curtain on characters and events as remove a blindfold from our eyes after a long car ride to parts unknown and plunging us directly into an operation of the far-left revolutionary group known as the French 75. That was Rick Blaine’s drink in “Casablanca” as he often found himself in a grey are while weighing whether to remain neutral or get involved and a grey area is where “One Battle After Another” often finds itself too. Like the no holds barred beginning in which Anderson effectively, if not dangerously, animates not only the anarchic but kinky thrill of such fanaticism as the French 75 liberates a detention camp and sets off bombs built by the so-called Rocketman, Pat Calhoun (Leonard DiCaprio), who is in love with fellow extremist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). There’s a recurring joke about Pat’s failure to study the rebellion text, and though that might sound like Anderson isn’t taking their mission seriously, it’s more an evocation so many similar far-left groups and their sensationalist, sincere, sometimes incomprehensible motivations. We never hear the French 75 read their manifesto because this opening is the manifesto.
This revolutionary idyll is compromised, however, when Perfidia kills a security guard during a bank robbery and learns she’s pregnant. Pat wants to put their baby first, but Anderson suggests that the amount of skin in the game is different based on skin color. Perfidia is shown to hail from a line of Black revolutionaries, and to her, the cause supersedes any one person, even her own child. The thorniness of this decision underlines the multi-layered nature of Anderson’s screenplay, as intricate in its ideas as it is obvious. Look no further than Perfidia’s name, Latin for betrayal, foreshadowing how after committing murder, she names names and enters witness protection, never to be seen again, the deliberate sidelining of Taylor’s explosive presence mirroring the French 75’s implosion as Pat goes underground with their daughter, Charlene. That child, however, is not his.
Enter: Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), overseeing the detention camp the French 75 liberates as the movie opens, who becomes tormented by and obsessed with Perfidia after she paradoxically deadens his sense of power by asking him in no uncertain terms to get it up and parading him around in just that manner. He gets the last word by extorting her for sex, and then forcing her to become a proverbial rat, only for her to vindictively ghost him while leaving Charlene behind. The child becomes paramount when Lockjaw is invited to join a white-only secret society whose name, The Christmas Adventurers Club, sardonically equates the War on Christmas with Gen. Jack D. Ripper’s battle to maintain purity of essence in “Dr. Strangelove.” (Their salutation of “Hail Saint Nick” sounds like the password at M*gyn K*lly’s Christmas party.) They explain to Lockjaw their belief of being the supreme race and therefore supreme beings and as they do, Penn does the most incredible thing with his face, as if the Colonel’s life flashes before his eyes, craving an honor he knows he does not deserve given the ostensible impurity of his precious bodily fluids. To ensure his qualifications for the club, he enlists a division of the armed forces for a search and destroy mission of his biracial heir.
Time is nebulous in “One Battle After Another.” Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, about a 70s revolutionary withering in the 80s, Anderson sets his movie in something approximating the present but never comes out and says it; I only realized it was a modern setting upon noticing someone taking a selfie. This can make the French 75 feel out of place, 70s counterculture oddly transplanted to the 21st century, but in this muddling of eras, Anderson inherently suggests both the perpetual futility in fighting the machine and the eternal need for it. That duality comes across in Pat, rechristened Bob Ferguson after he goes underground in the small California town of Baktan Cross with Charlene, rechristened Willa (Chase Infiniti). At one point, he is shown smoking dope and watching “The Battle of Algiers” on the couch, which is as uproariously pitiful as it is on the nose. Costumed to look less like Leo than Kevin Corrigan, DiCaprio fully inhabits the incongruous blend of both the perpetually baked protagonist of “The Big Lebowski” (Jeff Bridges) and that same movie’s reactionary Malibu police chief (Leon Russom), a spent counterculturist confronting modern political correctness, but never forgetting to let an almost fervent protective love for Willa seep through, a deft feat of zaniness and earnestness.
Under the guise of a drug and immigrant operation, Lockjaw and his men invade Baktan Cross, and when Bob and Willa become separated, the listless father is finally forced up and off the couch (though not necessarily out of his bathrobe) to re-enlist, in manner of speaking. He is aided in his rescue mission by his daughter’s sensei, Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who in effect becomes Bob’s sensei, too. Even in a movie chock full of exemplary turns, del Toro’s is especially exquisite, echoing the movie’s wavelength by infusing philosophical lines with as much genuine humor as real weight (“Courage, Bob”), though he doesn’t even require dialogue to make an impression, embodying the whole person in his air, a cool, encouraging, patient countenance that is not just an impeccable juxtaposition to Bob’s manic air but an expression of someone leading by example. In these sequences, “One Battle After Another” essentially leads by example too. Baktan Cross, it turns out, is not merely a sanctuary for ex-radicals but also for Mexican immigrants, which Anderson intrinsically lays out side-by-side with Sergio fostering Bob’s escape, a community as an act of resistance itself, and one that might just be more effective than the French 75’s more lethal tactics.
As Willa, Infiniti evinces both the singular impulsive honesty of a teenager but also a preciousness identifying her as a chip off her mother’s block. Indeed, Bob might be coming to her rescue, but ultimately, she rescues herself, putting into perspective how Anderson yokes Willa’s dawning political awareness to the age-old idea of a parent having to make peace with letting their child go. And if she has both Perfidia and Bob in her, she also carries the tutelage of Sergio, and the biology of her natural father, too, a complicated personification of an impossibly complicated country, one that is always so close to its potential and yet always so far away from it. And that’s why against all odds, “One Battle After Another”
earns its concluding
needle drop, a father passing the torch to his daughter, sending Willa out the door and on her way, gearing up for the next battle in the endless struggle.
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