Paul Thomas Anderson (“There Will Be Blood”) is a man stuck in the past. Or at least he was. The filmmaker’s 30-year career has covered an eclectic mix of genre and setting. Still, his films share a common theme of exile from the present, lingering with the aesthetics and themes of an old soul. Anderson’s last contemporary film, “Punch-Drunk Love,” came out well over 20 years ago and has since been followed by five period pieces. Many have speculated on what drives Anderson’s reluctance to set a film in the present: Is he obsessed with the films and books of the past? Is he scared to give his characters an iPhone? Maybe the present is too ugly to film? For what it’s worth, I think that Anderson just hadn’t found the right story and has instead found himself wanting to explore rich and diverse historical stories, maybe too intimidated to take on our contemporary hellscape. That is, until now.
In loosely adapting the novel “Vineland” by the hermetic author Thomas Pynchon, Anderson returns to the present, exploring it in all of its messy, smartphone-brain-filtered ugliness. “One Battle After Another” follows the revolutionary escapades of the radical group known as the French 75. Our protagonist, Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio, “Killers of the Flower Moon”), acts as the group’s demolition expert, providing explosive devices as they besiege Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities and rob banks. One of the few white members of the organization, Pat is in a relationship with an assertive group leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, “A Thousand and One”). When a police crackdown — led by the hard-ass, stereotypically career military man Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, “Licorice Pizza”) — threatens the identity of the 75’s members, Pat goes into hiding.
This police pursuit is prompted by the cat-and-mouse relationship between Col. Lockjaw and Perfidia. Lockjaw, a virulent racist, develops a bizarre fixation with Perfidia, which blurs the lines between his racist antagonism and sexual obsession. When Pat and Perfidia’s daughter is born (with Lockjaw and Perfidia’s relationship leaving the door open to the possibility that the daughter is his child), Lockjaw makes it his mission to find her, perhaps ashamed of having an interracial child. All the while, Pat, changing his name to Bob Ferguson, moves to a town called Baktan Cross with his and Perfidia’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, “Presumed Innocent”). Amid these events, Perfidia disappears as the film jumps 16 years into the future.
From the very first sequence, the film is an adrenaline-filled, punchy thriller, moving from set piece to set piece at a breakneck pace. Anderson is completely in control of his filmmaking here, deftly gliding through tones and visual language with ease. When the moment requires quieter tension, Anderson slows it down and moves us in, tracking our characters with tight shots that convey a sense that the tense scene might explode at any moment. When the moment gets bigger, Anderson opens up his most grandiose set pieces to date, culminating in an absolutely extraordinary car chase sequence through the hills of Northern California. The cars bob up and down with each peak, in and out of sight, the past chasing the future to create a sequence that is one of the most visually jaw-dropping and deeply resonant of the film.
DiCaprio’s performance as Pat/Bob is one of the most versatile and effective we’ve seen from him. After starting his career as a heartthrob, DiCaprio has since largely played reprehensible monsters — particularly in his collaborations with Martin Scorsese. This role is far more nuanced in comparison, with DiCaprio portraying a flawed (and at times very stupid) man who is driven by his anti-authoritarian streak and unconditional love for his daughter.
By the second act of the film, his character is a changed man, shifting from youthful revolutionary to burnout weed dad. After the loss of Perfidia and 15 years of frying his brain with almost every substance known to man, Bob is a shell of his former self. He is unable to remember the secret passcode and revolutionary tenets that he once risked his life for, yet he is also continually paranoid of his past, forbidding Willa from owning a phone and making her carry the 75’s tracking device. DiCaprio’s shenanigans as the doofus that is Bob also add an element of humor to the story. Through his performance, the film engages in some slapstick humor as this middle-aged loser tries to reignite his revolutionary spark while clad in an oversized flannel bathrobe and musty beanie.
Still, there is a deeper absurdity that draws from its Pynchon roots: an author who is known for his outrageous naming conventions (some classics include “Pig Bodine,” “Meatball Mulligan” and “McClintic Sphere”). The novel “Vineland” is an examination of ’60s counterculture, lending it an aura of hyper-satire that Pynchon plays with to mock and analyze the failures of that political moment. Anderson borrows from Pynchon’s tone, adapting it to modern political issues.
One example in “One Battle After Another” is Col. Lockjaw’s attempts to join a white nationalist secret society known as the Christmas Adventurers, a group that lives in WASP-y suburban homes that offer banana pancakes upstairs while making evil schemes of racial domination in a secret bunker downstairs. The world crafted through Anderson’s absurdity is a hyperbolic extension of our own: a hellscape of evil people and evil times so incoherent that sometimes you can’t help but just laugh.
When Col. Lockjaw does reappear, looking for Bob and Willa, the father and daughter are separated as Lockjaw pursues Willa. Meanwhile, Bob is assisted by Willa’s karate teacher, Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro, “The Phoenician Scheme”), who partners with his wife to run what he describes as a “Latino Harriet Tubman” network assisting the undocumented immigrants of Baktan Cross. Bob is a passive protagonist, with things happening to him more than him taking an active role in driving action forward.
To some extent, this is an important thematic element of the film: Bob is at the fulcrum of history but not influencing history himself, and this impotence reflects his inability to protect his own daughter. The French 75’s cause may have been a noble one, but by the second half of the film, a generation of political failures has passed, leaving a broken world. Left behind in these remnants is Willa, who finds the consequences of Bob’s actions catching up to her. While Bob does the best he can to save her, it is ultimately up to Willa alone to escape Lockjaw’s pursuit. Infiniti, making her big screen debut, is revelatory as Willa. Her performance lends weight to her dynamic with DiCaprio, creating a truly compelling father-daughter relationship that fits well with the film’s themes of the past and future. In the second half of the film, she almost becomes its true lead as she holds her own alongside multiple Oscar winners.
The ironic twist to the film’s setting is that for Anderson’s first contemporary film in decades, it undoubtedly owes a debt to the past. The nature of the French 75 and the political struggle they’re involved in are far more reminiscent of the radical militants of the ’60s — groups like the Weather Underground or the Black Panthers — than anything in the present. Anderson’s nostalgic underpinnings seep through the visuals of the film as well. Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman (“Licorice Pizza”) chose to shoot the film on VistaVision, a nearly archaic format of 35mm film that, until recently, hadn’t been used for a major studio release since the early ’60s.
The visual capacity of this format lights up the screen beautifully: In a nighttime sequence, the sky is illuminated in a gorgeous iridescent shade of purple that evokes Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” while other scenes possess a glossy sheen that contrasts with the messy and erratic images on the screen. This works brilliantly because it is visually stunning, especially alongside Anderson’s mastery of blocking and shot composition, which makes nearly every shot wonderful to look at. However, it also works as a cohesive element alongside the film’s narrative, presenting a visual representation of the past lingering in the future, much like Bob himself.
In spite of its tone, “One Battle After Another” is Anderson’s most sentimental film to date. Much of the narrative around the film, understandably, is about its political statements, with the film being described as “urgent,” or other buzzwords that reviewers use when a movie is vaguely relevant to current events. But to some extent, the obvious, flashy political statements of the film are really just set dressing for the more important message Anderson wants to tell about fatherhood. The common throughline from action scenes to off-kilter comedic sequences is a father-daughter drama about looking back at the broken world you’ve left your kid and hoping your own mistakes won’t catch up with them.
So much of Anderson’s work is centered around domineering, abusive father figures — from Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview in “There Will Be Blood” to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd in “The Master” — that “One Battle After Another” having a depiction of a genuinely caring father feels both so fresh in Anderson’s filmography and like a culmination of his work to this point. It is the true thematic heart of the film, buoyed by the dynamic between DiCaprio and Infiniti. This dynamic is also the key element to the rest of the film working as well as it does. As beautiful as any action sequence may be, it can only be as exhilarating as the ending’s car chase if the character stakes are established.
The only thing that could bring Anderson out of the past is a vision of the world so dire that we need to look to the future. Bob may be helpless at times, but he is there for his daughter when it matters, leaving the viewer with a sweet and sentimental feeling that makes you almost forget about all of the horrible things that happened in its nearly three-hour runtime. It is a movie of the past — shot in an old format, adapted from an old book and telling a story of an old guy. But it is also a movie of the future — reimagining our political outlook and focusing on the relationships that matter. Blending the frenetic action of a blockbuster thriller with the idiosyncratic tone and humor of a Pynchon novel, “One Battle After Another” is undoubtedly one of the best movies of the year, if not the decade, so far.
Daily Arts Writer Will Cooper can be reached at wcoop@umich.edu.
