Warning: this post contains spoilers.
If you’re someone who pays attention to reviews, you already know that the ones for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another are glowing: One called it a “generation-defining masterpiece.” Another deemed it to be “one of the decade’s best movies.” Several others claimed it’s “an instant classic,” and as of this writing, it has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes.
They’re all 100% right. The film — which was also written by Anderson but is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland — is easily the director’s best work to date. It’s rare for a movie to so expertly toe genre lines, but One Battle After Another (like life itself) is so many different things all at once: funny, moving, thrilling, suspenseful, visually stunning and extremely relevant to the times we find ourselves in. (Though as one character puts it, “Time doesn’t exist, but it controls us anyway.”) It’s the best performance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s career; he and Sean Penn are locks for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor when Oscar nominations are announced. It’s one of those movies you need to sit with for a while to really take in its messages about race, power, revolution and fatherhood, and it’s one of those movies you need to see in a theater, on the biggest screen you possibly can.
But for a movie that’s already being called the defining film of its generation, a large chunk of its nearly three-hour runtime takes place 16 years in the past. Act 1 introduces us to the fictional, far-left militant group called the French 75 as they manage to break into an immigration detention center at the border and free the migrants being held there. (It’s a topic that feels especially loaded given the current political climate, with plainclothes ICE officers routinely snatching people up off the street, but it’s worth noting that this part takes place in 2009 — the early days of Obama’s presidency.) We meet Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), an explosives expert who becomes smitten with a fellow activist named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). During the raid, Perfidia sexually humiliates Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (played by a truly unhinged Penn) in an incident that the uptight Army man later refers to as “being raped, but in reverse.” Soon enough, she’s pregnant, then dealing with postpartum depression and a desire to get back to robbing banks and bombing the offices of pro-life politicians. She flees to Mexico, leaving Bob to raise their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, making her excellent big-screen debut) on his own.
When we see Bob in the present-day timeline, he’s not exactly thriving. He sits around in a very Big Lebowski-esque bathrobe all day, smoking weed and becoming more paranoid by the second. He’s been out of the game for a while, but it turns out his fears are justified: after another French 75 member gets picked up and forced to name names, Lockjaw — who, despite being openly racist, has been harboring some feelings for Perfidia — is convinced Willa is actually his daughter. A lot happens after that — including the introduction of a white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club, who greet each other with “Hail St. Nick!” — but it’s too much to fully get into here. Eventually, Willa, who has been abducted, winds up in the hands of Lockjaw, who intends to kill her because she’s evidence that he once had an interracial relationship, and Bob sets off on a madcap adventure to save her.
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Featuring a new season of “Only Murders in the Building,” a triple album from Jeff Tweedy and moreThere’s been a lot of speculation about where exactly the film’s politics lie, about whether it endorses its protagonists’ violent tactics of rebellion. But Anderson goes out of his way to keep things vague, never mentioning a single politician by name, and its thesis is right there in the title. When Willa is (spoiler alert) safely back home by the end of the movie, she decides to follow in her mother’s footsteps and join the fight while “American Girl” — a perfectly deployed needle drop in a movie chock full of them — plays. She’s the next generation, left to pick up the pieces and continue pressing on even when it seems hopeless. There have been evil people and good people for as long as there have been people in general, and they will forever be at odds; each generation’s job is just to leave the world a little better than the last generation. The individual players and the specific causes come and go, and it is…well, one battle after another, but we have to keep trying. Humanity is a game of inches, and we’re like Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the hill for eternity.
What’s most arresting about One Battle After Another is the way Anderson uses the camera to remind us that, at the end of the day, we’re all just people. The movie, which was the first to be filmed in VistaVision in 60 years, is full of extreme close-ups of its characters’ faces, so we can really see and feel their emotions, no matter how subtle they are. A mouth twitch, an eye slowly welling up, a clenched jaw — they’re all gargantuan here, and they help us to really revel in what are some truly outstanding performances. Sean Penn is going to deservedly get a ton of praise for his Lockjaw, but we also have to mention Benicio del Toro, who’s a captivating, calming presence in a movie full of chaos and panic as a karate instructor who’s running what he refers to as “a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation” out of his apartment. There’s a decent amount of Spanish dialogue in the film, and Anderson makes the interesting choice to present it without subtitles. He trusts audience members who may not speak Spanish to be able to understand what’s being said based on body language and tone of voice; pain, joy, grief, weariness, confusion — these are all universal, and Anderson drives that home by not making one language the default over another.
Those tight frames aren’t just of faces, either. Anderson uses point-of-view shots to put us in his characters’ shoes: Sometimes we’re in the front seat of a car that’s about to slam into another, and sometimes we’re behind the wheel, speeding up and down some massive, picturesque hills. (The latter scene, arguably one of the best car chase sequences of all time, felt like being on a rollercoaster.) We’re along for the ride on both sides, scrambling to save ourselves or staring across a table at a sweaty wannabe Nazi. It makes for one hell of a cinematic experience, and it’s a big reminder of why it’s important to see movies in theaters instead of streaming on a much smaller screen at home. Some films need that big screen to truly get their director’s vision across, and One Battle After Another is undeniably one of them. The camera work is riveting, but at the end of the day, it serves a purpose: to remind us that we’re all just a bunch of flesh and bone, and that all we can do is move through life with love instead of hate and try to keep fighting the latest battle.
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