‘Battle’ Ready
Paul thomas Anderson drops one of the best, most timely, hopeful and kick-ass thrillers of the year. Also: Hello, Sean Penn.
One Battle After Another
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson • Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson, based on a book by Thomas Pynchon
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall
USA • 2hrs 42mins
Opens Hong Kong September 25 • IIB
Grade: A
Paul Thomas Anderson has gone on the record a few times recently claiming One Battle After Another is not inherently a political film. Hardy fuckin’ har. But in reality the film that speaks to This Moment is every bit as period-entrenched as any of his other films, so he has a point. The great irony is that the film was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 Vineland, is set on a timeless, neo-western frontier and hinges on Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” – all of which are as relevant now as when they were created. The political undercurrent in One Battle is that this shit’s still going on, and Anderson, willingly or not, turns a glaring spotlight on the foundational and systemic white supremacy that powers the USA and much of the world, that always has, but is now acceptable in polite circles.
Personally, Anderson runs hot and cold. Only two of his 10 films (Hard Eight and Punch Drunk Love) run under two hours long, so indulgence is in his cinematic DNA. Sometimes his leisurely commitment to character as a way to weigh on the ills of America pay off, like they did in Boogie Nights (still my favourite because you can’t start a movie with “Best of My Love” and not be), Magnolia and the endlessly quotable There Will Be Blood. At other times he just gets messy and aggressively inscrutable. Such as in Inherent Vice, starring the messy and aggressively inscrutable Joaquin Phoenix, and Licorice Pizza – with the exception of Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters. This time, however, that indulgence pays off. The gut instinct will be to pair One Battle with Ari Aster’s Eddington but the better companion would be Kathryn Bigelow’s forthcoming A House of Dynamite. Together you’ve got 2025 in a nutshell.
Clueless dad energy
Unlike Aster’s wobbly work, One Battle is frequently satirically hilarious, thanks in large part to Leonardo DiCaprio tapping the inner physical comedy maestro that showed up for The Wolf of Wall Street, Benicio del Toro’s delightfully loopy-yet-fully-committed karate sensei, big screen newcomer Chase Infiniti holding her own as the scion of radicals and, above all, Sean Penn as a ludicrous, but dangerous, military man with a walk that says it all. With all his dick moves lately it’s easy to forget that Penn is a stellar actor, and man. Does he ever do a number in this. Wrap these characters up in gorgeous VistaVision Kodak 35mm photography by Michael Bauman (the final roller coaster car chase is an all-timer) and set it to an evocative score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood on his fifth Anderson film (as well as Pablo Larraín’s Spencer and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog) and you have the the recipe for one of the year’s best. “Dirty Work” is the needle drop of choice in One Battle. Approved.
Short version: Back in the (unlabelled) day, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (DiCaprio) is a member of French 75, a domestic terror (according to police) organisation, hell bent on “free bodies, free choice, free movement, free speech motherfucker” and toppling the fascist regime. When Pat’s partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (utter badass Teyana Taylor, A Thousand and One, January’s The Rip) crosses a line and rats out the F75 – among them the awesomely named Junglepussy and Deandra (Regina Hall) – he takes off with their daughter Charlene (Infiniti, Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent) and settles down in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Though now a burnt out pothead, Bob has trained Willa in all F75’s codespeak, paranoid that one day his arch-nemesis Steven Lockjaw (Penn) is going to come for them, an army colonel with a literal boner for Perfidia, Bob and Willa. He weaponises his squad to terrorise Baktan Cross and its undocumented community, all to impress the white power Christmas Adventurers Club leader Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn) and secure membership. You will never look at St Nick the same way ever again.
On top of the obvious, One Battle is a father-daughter family drama exploring the concepts of parenthood and responsibility, and it makes you think of Dick Gregory’s “White man, black woman, black baby,” barbs used in Public Enemy’s “Fear of a Black Planet”. It’s about communities faced with oppression and persecution, and how those communities respond and find resilience. It’s about private activism, demanding equal justice and making the world better – and the limits of it when private interests suddenly clash with those ideals. You know the kind, the free loving, civil rights for all type hippies that suddenly embrace the state because now that they own a house, well… It’s also about hope and optimism, and the willingness for some, many, to keep up the fight. One Battle After Another could be Anderson’s most human film to date, and that’s saying a lot.
Those contradictions run through One Battle, and are impeccably personified by a cast that pulls it off with a level of casual nuance that’s award-worthy. Each toggles between darkly comic and infuriatingly tragic at the drop of a hat, starting with Taylor as a woman so committed to her cause she’s blinded to her family. In Bob’s frustration with “the kids these days” (poor Comrade Josh), his performative activism and abandonment of fiery drive that only white privilege allows DiCaprio is pitch perfect – largely because sure. Yeah. He has a daughter to worry about now. Perhaps DiCaprio’s abandonment of his personal environmentalism informed his performance. Either way it sits in contrast to del Toro’s Sergio St Carlos, Willa’s sensei and one of Baktan Cross’s immigrant community leaders, who takes Bob along for the ride during his own “Latino Harriet Tubman” moment. He respects the F75 so of course he helps, but he also demonstrates a life of resistance he doesn’t have the luxury of dropping. Hovering over it all, and really holding the film together over its masterfully paced run time is Penn, whose tightly wound true believer is undone by sexual obsession with Perfidia. Penn has some of the film’s best comic moments in hilarious reactions to things not going his way. When Willa asks him why his t-shirt is so tight (chef’s kiss) his blistering “I am NOT a homosexual” distills Lockjaw (Lockjaw!) and his white supremacist lunatics to their fragile, thin-skinned essence. Get ready for the think pieces.