One Battle After Another

“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. 

Phantom Thread

As is typical with latter day Paul Thomas Anderson Events, there are vast depths to purge in his latest opus “Phantom Thread”, a wholly original creation rather than an adaptation, even if it liberally quotes all manner of Hitchcock. Those depths, however, are not merely weighted more toward the end but brought down in the mix. “Phantom Thread” is not as joyously wispy a creation as his previous “Inherent Vice”, though it has more stiff comedy coursing through its veins than you might expect, but nevertheless an enticing ode to exacting craftsmanship. That artistry is evoked in ornately monikered main character Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a meticulous fashion designer, yes, but just as much in Anderson’s own auteurist majesty. If “Phantom Thread” ultimately reveals itself as something like a romance with scant traditional ardor, the movie’s aesthetic is so audiovisually intoxicating that simply watching this movie is to fall head over heels in love. But then, that cinematic ravishment also functions as something akin to misdirection before Anderson as metaphorical dressmaker reveals the figurative gown he has fitted us for is so slender in the neck that all the life in us is being choked out.

If previous Anderson movie environs have been all-encompassing metaphorical dirges for certain ways of American life, “Phantom Thread” goes the other way, a surprisingly intimate chamber drama that gets right up close, emblemized in Woodcock’s morning routine where he shines his shoes, styles his hair, and snips away the hairs in his nose. If the latter often suggests vanity, it seems to go further here, suggesting the old phrase cleanliness is next to godliness, which is sort of how Woodcock sees himself, as god of the House of Woodcock. That’s the figure he cuts as the movie begins sitting at the end of his dining table, physically with his significant other yet still utterly unto himself, and when she deigns to serve him fattening sweet rolls, he kicks her out. Well, he does not kick her out so much as silently delegate his dressmaking deputy Cyril (Lesley Manville) to do it for him.

Though Cyril is his sister, she suggests Madame Anna Sebastian, the Machiavellian mother of Claude Rains’s character in Hitchcock’s “Notorious”, as much in charge as him whether or not he knows it, which he probably doesn’t. Indeed, Manville has Cyril receive Reynolds’s dictums and tongue-lashings so coolly that the idea of him being wrapped around her finger just intrinsically emerges. And Day-Lewis does not so much temper his tantrums by letting all the hot air out as allowing the hot air to build to a point of almost weird burlesque, like the sure be be iconic scene in which his emergent love interest scrapes butter across toast so loudly that he throws a fit. It’s not the buttering that is funny so much as his petulance drolly being raised; it’s like Day-Lewis is playing The Cowardly Lion without removing his mask.

His turn is not unlike Anderson’s photography, almost seeming to reshape its mood within frames, from domineering to defeated to delicate and back again. He is never more delicate than when Reynolds meets his match in the form of Alma (Vicky Krieps) who is waitressing at some seaside café, with flushed cheeks suggesting an innocence waiting to be corrupted, where he shows up to unwind, and where Day-Lewis transforms placing a breakfast order into a kind of courtlier version of Michael Fassbender staring at the woman on the subway in “Shame.” Woodcock is working up an emotional appetite, of course, one that takes form not so much in lovemaking as dressmaking, as he concludes their first date not by squiring her to the boudoir but his workshop.

In effect, Reynolds reduces Alma to a mannequin, propping her up and taking her measurements while Cyril records them. When Alma laments the size of her breasts, Reynolds remarks that it’s his job to give her some, if he chooses to, a line Day-Lewis gives an air of less control than doing-his-job fact. If it sounds off-putting, well, it is and isn’t, as Krieps plays Alma with a sense of at once being taken aback and turned on, underlined in the sequence’s searing Christopher Scarabosio sound design – the smack of the tape measure, the scribble of the pencil, the way shoes slide across the wood floor – that is so piercing it can make you cringe even if you simultaneously, improbably sense yourself getting aurally high, like one might aromatically from the smells of a kitchen.

That we never quite know where Alma came from never feels like a flaw but just right, emblemized in how she goes on to become Woodcock’s muse, sculpted into what he wants her to be. But if most movies might have let matters lie there, “Phantom Thread” then charts Alma’s esoteric journey to twisted self-actualization, which Krieps plays not by sitting in the middle of the boxing ring and slugging it out with Day-Lewis but deftly coming in from the side. Impressively, only once the movie is all over do you see the way in which Anderson’s turn laid in wait all along. It’s not something you put together like a puzzle post-screening, though, because the movie isn’t a riddle to be solved, so much as seek to wrap your bent mind around. I’m being coy here, I understand, and I apologize, but it’s delicate to discuss just how “Phantom Thread” upends its basic blueprint for something else instead, which, in essence, is what Alma does, not allowing herself to simply be talked to but talking back in ways you would not believe.

But if that makes it sound feel-good, that’s not quite right either, achieving some other plain that suggests peace, love and understanding in almost brutish, otherworldly form. That ethereal sensation, however, does not completely separate them from our current world, even if Anderson’s movie makes no overtures of timeliness. Maybe that’s because “Phantom Thread’s” détente is rooted in something ageless, one, weird as it may sound, that sort of reminded me of “The Princess Bride’s” Westley building up immunity to iocane power, and how humanity’s toxins might best be combatted by simply embracing them.

Inherent Vice

If "The Master", Paul Thomas Anderson's ginormous puzzle of God-knows-whatism, pertinently established a prevalent theme, it was that its auteur had become The Master of the engimatic cinematic behemoth. Mr. Anderson's run times are colossal, his themes plunge to unknowable depths, his films demand incessant re-watches (has there been a modern-day director whose work so often elicits the comment "I can't wait to watch it again"?) and even then it can be a Herculean struggle to make heads or tails of what's going on. "Inherent Vice", however, while copying the length of PTA's predecessors, is nowhere near as psychologically impenetrable. Oh, it's confusing, definitely, but that's simply on account of an intentional runaway plot. Grasping its innumerable parts is not as consequential as drinking in its refreshingly slack vibe.

The film's kaleidoscopic story is seen through the tinted glasses of Doc Sportello, played by that most physically present of actors, Joaquin Phoenix, with a Lennon-ish mane, a feelin'-groovy strut and a voice that suggests a mellow if firm belief in brotherly love, even if that belief is not always reciprocated. He is a 40's gumshoe re-imagined as a late 60's beatnik trying to keep on keepin' on at the dawn of the 70's, Philip Marlowe if Philip Marlowe preferred bare feet to Florsheims and liked his cannabis anywhere, night or day, rather than his brandy in a glass.

Doc is approached by his ex, the marvelously named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katerine Waterston), like Cerie Xerox crossed with Michelle Phillips. Her current squeeze, a real estate magnate of some renown (Eric Roberts), a none-too-subtle harbinger of greed and excess, has disappeared and she winsomely asks if Doc might help. He agrees to snoop, but less as a sucker lured by a femme fatale than a guy who simply wants to remain right-on for the gal he still adores. That's a critical delination, marking the film as a noir colored in kodachrome as opposed to stern black & white.

"Inherent Vice" is based on a 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon which I have not read, but which seems saddled with a permanent disclaimer of "Unfilmable." And if that's true, it seems at least possible that someone like P.T. Anderson would take such a disclaimer as a personal challenge. His finished product is leisurely and long, even though it feels entirely present in its individual moments, of which there are so, so many. It's akin to a two-and-a-half hour shaggy dog story. If P.T. closes a door, he opens a window. If he closes a window, he opens a portal to some other dimension. At one point, when conducting an "interview", Doc jots down in his notebook "something Spanish." That's essentially the language of the tale being communicated: something Spanish.

It's an able-bodied proposition in keeping everything straight, the names and places, the comings and goings, the vanishings and re-appearances. Martin Short, I'm reasonably certain, wearing a plum suit that makes him look like a deposed emperor, was merely a hallucination from the halluconigen wafting off the screen. That character couldn't have been real. I don't even remember how he factored into the story, which theoretically rules this critic out of order but then watching this film unfold is like being one of the mafiosos in "True Romance" listening to Floyd try and give directions. Who the hell knows? We'll get there when we get there. Jena Malone's one-scene walk-off is sheer magnificence but I'm not sure where it fits either.

Well, maybe I am. She's an ex-heroin addict who's cleaned up in the name of her baby girl and though she summons Doc because she needs him to track down her husband who's also gone missing (and who's played by Owen Wilson with an air that suggests he showed up in the middle of filming and just said "Cast me"). She makes time for a mind-bending monologue with a sunflower coffee cup about her past, present and future, illustrating the delicate line between the counter-culture and the squares. It's blending, and when it's gone, it'll be gone, and it's why the real pre-eminent relationship of the film isn't so much Doc & Shasta as Doc & Detective Christian "Bigfoot" Bjornsen.

He's played by Josh Brolin with a severe buzzcut and a deadpan gloom denoting a belief that the world is fucked and that vile hippie scum did the fucking. He can't stand Doc and seems eternally out to get him, and yet needs him as an informant much like Doc relies on him for information. They're in this together, like it or not. In the most hysterical sequence in a film this year Doc hallucinates a late-night commercial starring "Bigfoot" in the role of precisely the sort of vile bohemian he despises. Brolin's impeccable monotone makes every flower-power aphorism ring with a hilarity Ron Burgundy could never hope to match. It's also emblematic of the whole film, not just its laconic wit but the way these dueling aspects of America - Dude and Groovy, Man - have run headlong into one another.

We know which one eventually wins, yet whereas anger has so often spilled from the pen of Paul Thomas Anderson, this one is coated in a warmth foreign to the rest of its auteur's oeuvre. Not even in "Punch Drunk Love", a film which felt studious in its glow whereas the glow of "Inherent Vice" feels innate. The characters may mock one another but the film doesn't mock the characters. It's a judge-free zone, observational, and uproarious, and even romantic. It may capture the dying embers of a more free-thinking era, but it doesn't seek to bitterly deconstruct it so much as plaintively wave goodbye.