This is the year that auteurs chose to make action movies. First we got the very good Caught Stealing from Darren Aronofsky. Now we have Paul Thomas Anderson’s excellent One Battle After Another. What next? Will Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother see the titular quartet fighting to the death amid CGI explosions? It’s quite an odd phenomenon, and I’m sure it says something about our world at this moment. While Aronofsky distanced his film from our current troubles by setting it in the 1990s, Anderson’s shoot-em-up is squarely in the now…or maybe the soon.
Eleven years ago, PTA gave us the first film adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, Inherent Vice. It didn’t take off at the box office, but it’s a film I love—a perfectly balanced shaggy dog story of observational chuckles. Now, he has turned to Pynchon again. This time, his film is credited as “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. I haven’t read it, but the qualifier may simply be due to the updating of the novel to confront the top headlines of our current decade.
One Battle After Another is an apt title, as it describes the film pretty well…but it’s also sort of one story after another. The first part of the film tells the story of Teyana Taylor’s driven “revolutionary” (militia leader? terrorist?), “Perfidia Beverly Hills”. While she begins and sustains a romantic relationship with Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Pat Rocketman”, she also gets kicks playing kinky games of sexual domination with the Colonel obsessed with taking down her organization, played (I hate to say it, but I think it’s the correct adverb) iconically by Sean Penn with massive biceps and a scuzzy fringe of white hair on his army-issue shaved head. Their story plays out—in twisted and twisty ways—and then the film jumps sixteen years ahead. Now, Leo (in his cover identity as “Bob”) is doing a not-great job of being a single father to the daughter Perfidia bore all those years ago.
Bob was never built for violence the way Perfidia was, so he’s done his best to forget his old life through drugs and booze, while also maintaining a paranoid hold on his daughter, Willa, that never lets him move on. It doesn’t take a lot to know that Sean Penn will come cleaning up loose ends in the film’s now-present (which, again, I think may be a near future…but that’s not important). It’s also obvious that Bob is no match for him. So, when the remaining militia members are reactivated to protect Willa, Bob’s frantic stumbling to find his daughter is somewhere between funny and tragic.
A lot of other people (mostly recognizable actors, all doing incredible work) enter and exit the story as Willa and Bob make their parallel fights/flights from the creepy white power illuminati known as the Christmas Adventurers Club. (Sean Penn’s fervent desire to join their ranks hinges on his pursuit of Bob and Willa.) Jonny Greenwood turns in another of his excellent scores that, together with the editing, makes the ensuing battles edge-of-your-seat thrilling stuff.
But what is the film “about”? It is deeply rooted in the battle over the US/Mexico border, and it clearly has an interest in fanatical cabals and violent obsessions. And while those things will make the film feel timely and get debated ad nauseam, I don’t think they’re the real core of the movie. For me, the film felt more subtly subversive than that (in a good way). As the revolutionaries spout slogans from the sixties and clash with immature men mired in old prejudices, Willa’s generation is culturally bleeding edge. The important juxtaposition, I think, comes in a great scene where Bob tries to call in help from the underground revolutionaries of this new generation, only to be met with gripes about “sound triggers” and “abuse of my safety” when he can’t remember the code phrase the voice on the phone demands. (In another scene, Bob is watching the excellent war film The Battle of Algiers, which just begs us to compare that warfare with this.) The film is sly in its mockery of today’s youth culture, but I think that mockery is just what it is when Bob grills Willa over her friends’ pronoun choices and chosen sexual identities.
To my mind, this is a top-shelf action chase film about a man caught between obsession (his past activities) and devotion (his panicked love for Willa). It is also an epic tale of “fighting the system” that compares the ruthless conviction of past youth revolutions with the offended ennui of the current crop of protestors. I can almost hear PTA lecturing his four children with wife Maya Rudolph: “You’re melting down over pronouns, while in my day we had to fight violently just for the right to marry someone with a different skin color?” While the cycle of culture may eternally be “one battle after another,” some of those battles wear that title better than others.
Anderson’s other message? “Enjoy movies, guys! I made this for your entertainment, and while I love that it makes you think, I’m happier to see you chewing your nails nervously throughout my movie.” Yes, that’s just me putting words in his mouth—but I definitely put my fingernails in my mouth during most of the film, too. This great movie is an earsplitting opening shot on the year’s awards season. Paul Thomas Anderson and his amazing cast and crew are coming!