What Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) is able to conjure with his latest, the explosive and heartfelt “One Battle After Another,” is a miracle; a film that is somehow a crowd-pleasing epic about socialist revolutionaries raging against the machines of imperialists and racist overlords that is somehow as funny as it is thrilling and as subversive as it is a rollicking good time. At nearly three hours, the film has not an ounce of fat on it; impossibly crafting a perpetual escalation of tension, drama, and slapstick antics that feel effortless and inevitable. Ballasted by two top-tier buffoon performances from Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, and crystallized into something truly special by Teyana Taylor and Chase Infinity, “One Battle After Another” is a staggering achievement of filmmaking and was in no way a film I thought PTA had in him.
Paul Thomas Anderson is undoubtedly one of the great American filmmakers of all time and arguably the most prolific auteur of his era. By writing and directing films like “Boogie Nights,” “There Will Be Blood,” “Magnolia” and “Punch Drunk Love,” PTA is as indysyntactic an artist as they come; a cypher through which many find immense meaning, and I, sadly, often find only bafflement. While I have seen each of PTA’s many films, most of which I would objectively classify as masterpieces at best and stone-cold classics at worst, his charms usually leave me cold. The films of his that I feel the most connected to, “The Master” and “There Will Be Blood,” are in many ways his most straightforward and the most focused in their storytelling. PTA likes to ramble, to meander; he likes to be a bit loosey goosey with his stories in a way that, for most, feels bold and for me feels undisciplined.I am undoubtedly the problem here and hope to begin my solo PTA reclamation project post haste after my screening of “One Battle After Another,” a film that impossibly takes all the unmoored charm of his best work and fires it through the lens of a deceptively simple chase movie that packs a wallop of both action and political fury without belaboring the point. It’s a magic trick, this movie, maybe not the finest of his career, but certainly the one that I am the most eager to revisit as soon as possible.
As “One Battle After Another” begins, we are following a group of underground socialist adjacent revolutionaries known as the “French 75″ mid-attempt to free a group of migrant families from military imprisonment. It is here we meet DiCaprio’s pyro expert, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, and Teyana Taylor’s cool and confident leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills, as they covertly storm what is effectively an ICE Detention Center, taking the soldiers by surprise and shepherding the unjustly detained to freedom. As part of their plan, Perfidia overtakes the leader of the compound, Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, a grotesque man with a horrendous combover who becomes immediately entranced by his captor with an obsession that will ultimately leave many dead in his rearview.
The first hour of the film follows the French 75 as they continue their reign of liberation, bloodlessly destroying financial institutions and government buildings to further their fight against the imperialists. All the while, Lockjaw is covertly watching all and blackmails Perfidia in exchange for sexual favors. A time jump shows Perfidia pregnant, still able to fire an AK-47 with expert skill. Pat, believing himself to be the father, hopes to build a family from the aftermath of their radical lifestyle. But for Perfidia, a lifelong revolutionary, cleaning diapers feels like just another form of oppression. Ultimately, she leaves Pat and their new daughter to continue her work in earnest, only to sprint headfirst into tragedy. A bank heist gone wrong leads to the French 75 being destroyed, Perfidia fleeing to Mexico, and Pat having to escape with his infant daughter into an unknown future.
We time jump again to when the daughter, Chase Infinity as Willa, is seventeen years old and begrudgingly caretaking her perpetually high, robe and thermal-wearing father, Pat. The pair has found something of a quaint life for themselves, hidden deep in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Although Pat is a shell of his former self, it’s clear he loves his daughter more than anything. Meanwhile, Steve Lockjaw, now a highly decorated and monstrous perpetrator of the erasure of brown folks from the United States, is seeking membership in a secret society of white supremacists known as the “Christmas Adventurers”. (I’m dead serious. The names in this movie are incredible.) He has all the qualifications, all the right prejudices and violent tendencies. There’s only one problem: there is a chance that Willa is, in fact, his daughter with Perfidia. A mixed-race child would destroy his chances of upper advancement into the highest echelons of this well-funded klan of Patagonia wearing idiots, so he must take it upon himself, utilizing the full might of the United States military, to hunt down and destroy the child of Perfidia Beverly Hills.
That is the long, yet necessary, build for the wholly satisfying ride that is “One Battle After Another”, a chase film that finds Willa taken and Pat, the stumbling weed-addled dolt that he is, now in need of reengaging with the revolutionary organizations he left behind many years ago. Along the way, he crosses paths with Benicio Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a Karate School Sensei who gives sanctuary to migrant workers. Through Sensei’s tutelage and assistance, Pat regains what little faculties he has left and is set on his way to find and save his daughter before Lockjaw can leave her dead in the desert.
DiCaprio might be the greatest actor alive at playing a Play-Doh-faced moron and is in fine form here, never breaking stride as a father desperate to keep his kid safe while somehow making his perpetual panic objectively hilarious. Penn, an actor I rarely enjoy, is so entrenched in Lockjaw’s perversity and rigid surety of his own righteousness that he himself is both scary and ridiculous. Yet the performances that steal the movie are those of Taylor and Infinity, playing mother and daughter revolutionaries with a power that explodes the screen into a million pieces. As Perfidia, Taylor is deftly able to make us care deeply for a mother who would abandon her family, herself unsure if that daughter was born of love or sexual coercion, convincing us that for her to be a revolutionary is to breathe and to abandon that would be suicide. Infinity, for her part, carries the back two-thirds of the movie in the smallest creases of her eyes; expertly finding the middle ground between budding radical and naive child in a way that feels deeply earned and real. As her transformation into her mother’s daughter comes full circle by the film’s end, it’s hard not to feel proud of Willa as if she were our own daughter. If there is a message the movie that overrides all others, it’s that the world we give our kids will be theirs to make better than how they found it. It’s a bum deal, but it’s one they will assuredly accept. The kids are alright, even if we’re not, and there’s something revolutionary about that.
“One Battle After Another” is a blast, personal and sweeping. My full theater on opening night was cheering at the screen for the entire runtime, and we were collectively shocked at how quickly those three hours sprinted by. While it may be too early to tell if this is PTA’s finest film, that would be up for vigorous and probably violent debate, it is surely his most accessible in a long, long time, and certainly one that I will be seeing again very soon.
¡Únete a la revolución!
You’ll be glad you did.
One Battle After Another is playing at The Broad Theater, Prytania Theatres at Canal Place, and on 70mm Film at Prytania Theaters Uptown.
