The Digital Revolutionaries Get Their Movie: "One Battle After Another"
A review of Paul Thomas Anderson's last flick
If I had more friends in Boston I wouldn’t have seen One Battle After Another. On a Saturday night in New York or Paris I would have drank and chased tail until the sun came out. I wouldn’t have gone during the week, either, because the name “Paul Thomas Anderson” doesn’t titillate me to the point of action. I hadn’t seen the trailer, didn’t know a single thing about the plot, knew nothing about the cast (except that DiCaprio was in it). For a second, during Sean Penn’s “erotic” opening sequence, I thought I was watching Sylvester Stallone pitch a tent.
With regards to new movies, I’ve become as skittish as a stray cat. For years I’ve been avoiding the cinema at all costs. I have a grave distrust of Hollywood, stemming from the duplicitous way they spread their propaganda. To me they’re like China, except worse, because they trick the viewer into thinking he’s free. America, the master of materialism and subterfuge. A nation that knows how to make people pay out of pocket for their re-education. At the theater the tuition fee starts with the ticket and increases, steeply, when one gets to the concession stand. I’ve been hit with those charges too many times. This time I brought my own popcorn, and a few beers in a miniature cooler. I cracked the first one right when the lights went down, and loudly at that.
One Battle commences with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) preparing for a mission with the French Seventy-Five, a left-wing revolutionary group. The two are caught up in some version of love or lust; together they’re fighting what they consider a fascist America. Their organization’s primary goal is to create a borderless society and aid illegal migrants. If they listed a longer litany, I missed it, but I imagine it would run along predictable lines: Decolonization, defund the police, etc., etc. The movie’s foil is Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, not Sylvester Stallone), a U.S. Army officer that’s out to disband the group. His unit arrests Perifida after the rebels botch a robbery attempt, thus separating her from Bob and their newborn daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). Sixteen years later, Lockjaw goes after them too. Without diving too deep into the details, he needs to reach them so he can gain admission into a White Nationalist group. Shortly after his return, his unit separates father from daughter. While Willa fights to escape from the solider, Bob struggles to rescue her from the danger he imposes. This three-way chase is the genesis for the furious, fast-paced action that makes up the film’s final two hours.
Anderson started writing the project in the early 2000s and wrapped filming during Biden’s term. Though he couldn’t have predicted the exact state of the U.S. today, the events of the last few years certainly shaped the movie into its final form. When he films cities on fire, I flash back to the BLM riots of 2020. When he turns the camera on border patrol, I see the inhuman detention facilities Trump is building throughout the nation. When he shows us a racist cabal, I think of Stephen Miller. And, when gun shots go off, I think of Luigi Mangione and Charlie Kirk. The movie is timely, politically charged, and speaks directly about the present moment.
I hate politically charged movies that speak about the present moment. The only way to not be sick of politics, at this point, is to be as devoted to it as the Puritans were to Christianity. Good Lord was I happy to spend much of this August and September in Europe. When Charlie Kirk got shot in the neck, I was eating fresh vegetables and drinking wine with my family in Paris. After the initial shock and dismay passed, I told them once again of my plans to escape the U.S. “Between the women and the political situation,” I said, “I just can’t do it anymore.”
And so I was unhappy during the first forty-five minutes of Anderson’s film. I thought the Rotten Tomato activists had hornswoggled me again. Everything struck me as another hoary Hollywood trope. Of course all the soldiers are white and tend towards malevolence and racism. Of course most of the leaders are black and female. Of course Bob Ferguson rears the child while his lover, Perfidia, shoots guns and robs banks. Of course one-third of Willa’s friend group is non-binary. Of course, of course, of course.
I used to not see the world this way. Before 2015 I didn’t think much about race or gender; when a movie forced me to, I usually found the angle fresh and new. But, since then, American producers, actors, screenwriters, and directors have been waterboarding me with identity and “morality.” I can’t get away from it. They’ve wounded me in the head. They’ve turned me into Bardamu from Journey to the End of the Night. I’ve been shot at too many times. Now I’m running around, screaming about bullets the reservists and the civilians can’t even see.
But then, around the one hour mark, everything about the film’s politics vanished from my mind. Why?
Through the centuries one of the most difficult questions for religions, cultures, and cults to answer has been: How do we successfully spread our morals and values? Story has almost always been the answer. Immersive narrative can function as a hypnotic spell. If it is strong enough, and the subject is willing, he will forget himself and open up to the storyteller’s ideas. But if the narrative loses its gravity or starts to feel false, the recipient will come back to his senses and say, “Hey, no, I see what you’re trying to do here.” He starts resisting the “story” because it is not absorbing but didactic. That sums up nearly every movie and show that Hollywood has regurgitated over the last ten years.
The first hour of Anderson’s film wasn’t engrossing enough to make me forget the L.A. clichés throughout. But when everyone gets off set and DiCaprio gets a call that they’re coming for him—in the midst of a THC-induced paranoia, no less—it’s impossible to think about politics. He is such a skilled actor, and the scene is so well-written, that he could’ve been sporting blue hair and a “Free Palestine” t-shirt and still I would’ve been lost in the moment.
From that point on the thriller never stops sprinting. The rest of the film consists of riveting escape scenes, high-adrenaline car chases, booming car accidents, wild shootouts—tension and excitement in every form imaginable. With the camera on the dashboard and the road roaring ahead and the car engine screaming, there is nowhere else you can be: You are actually there: You are flying down hilly one-lane highways in the desert with your heart racing.
Paul Thomas Anderson is not only a genius of conflict, speed, and stakes but a genius of perspective. True to life, every character is following his or her own story. When he centers the camera on even the most insignificant cast member, it is impossible to think of anyone else. Whether the shot lasts for a minute or an hour, the audience feels a complete presence created primarily by tension. There can be no thought of what came before or what will come next. Then Anderson switches to another character and the viewer is submerged in that point-of-view, in that character’s predicament. Suddenly the film has five or six or seven different storylines running at once. The director masterfully weaves all of them together; it takes no effort for the viewer to orient himself. Anderson is writing a novel and making a movie all at once.
Almost every single one of these characters is uproarious. Bob Ferguson—the stoned, aging revolutionary—keeps finding himself in trouble because he can’t remember passwords, run adequately, or show sufficient bravery. The aid that comes to his rescue—the sensei of his daughter’s dojo (Benicio del Toro)—does so through his own absurd antics. While the cops are hot on their tail, he’s handing out Modelo after Modelo. During one chase, he instructs Bob to hop and roll out the moving vehicle “like Tom Cruise.” Yet the funniest character of all is Steven J. Lockjaw. Torn between his racism and his appetite for black women, his determination to appear masculine and his homosexual tendencies, he is a conflicted burlesque soldier, hilarious in nearly every moment. Willa forms a great pair with Lockjaw and Ferguson in turn, amplifying their absurdities as well as a few of her own. Sharing the stage with the greatest actors of all time, the moment is never once too big for Infiniti. As the stakes get higher, her skill only increases.
I’ve read other reviews that tearfully talk about the beauty of the relationship between Bob and Willa, what it says about love, what it says about family. I felt some of that. But on the whole I felt that the movie was weakest when it became sentimental. With the exception of four or five scenes, I didn’t find it beautiful either. What it was was exciting, and that was plenty for me.
Well, I suppose there’s something more: The film also renders, faithfully, a part of America’s consciousness. Art, at one level at least, is supposed to proffer not objective truth but felt, psychological truth. One Battle does this marvellously. The America it portrays is a fictional nation where, if everything goes wrong, we might end up. But millions of citizens already see the country this way. To them America is a monster, malignant at its core. To them most, if not all, cops are racist. To them violent revolution is the only way out. If Anderson had made his movie more nuanced, it wouldn’t have been true to this perspective.
Over the past decade, a vocal part of the country has been cosplaying online as revolutionaries. They’ve taken to celebrating murder on Bluesky and Instagram for, what they consider, the greater good. Now they have a movie that speaks to them. They have their Batman and their Cat Woman. They have a fantasy of the lives they want to live, a breathing representation of how they view the world. For everyone else, One Battle After Another offers an opportunity to walk a few miles in their shoes.
But none of that would matter if it wasn’t a damn good movie, one that is worth watching in theaters to feel the fullness of its force. If I were a betting man, it’s going to be quite some time before I feel that way about a Hollywood movie again.
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