It seems that lately, many of our best directors are making their big “America” movies – movies about this so-called great experiment and where we find ourselves as a country today. Two years ago, we got Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Just this year, we got Ari Aster’s “Eddington,” and Spike Lee’s “Highest 2 Lowest.” If you squint, you could even count Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” among these films. And now, we’ve got “One Battle After Another.”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film follows Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up former member of a militant revolutionary group called the French 75, who has been in hiding with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) for 16 years following the disappearance of his wife and Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Bob is forced back into the game when an old enemy named Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) comes a-knocking, putting Willa’s life in danger.
“One Battle After Another” is explosive and incisive – both blunt object and rapier, clear-eyed in its view of this country and all its insidious entrails. But, for as much as “One Battle After Another” feels timely, it’s also a movie deeply concerned with America’s cyclical nature: there are always young people looking to change the world, and there’s always an old guard to be reckoned with.
Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the film features Anderson’s signature humor mixed with an impending sense of doom. But, perhaps the most surprising (and maybe subversive) thing about this paranoid thriller is how it’s imbued with a sense of hope – hope in our loved ones, hope in ourselves, and hope for what’s to come.
We’re introduced to a world not dissimilar from our own, immediately thrust into the French 75’s attempt to liberate a migrant encampment on the Mexican border. That extended sequence turns into a montage of explosions, gun shots, and sex, an encapsulation of the energy that our revolutionaries – including Bob and Perfidia Beverly Hills – feel at the beginning of this journey. “One Battle After Another” has a driving, forceful energy, particularly in multiple propulsive action sequences where Anderson shows off his mastery of spatial geography and pacing. Whether we’re navigating a vast underground network of hiding places for undocumented immigrants, or watching a three-car chase throughout the expanse of the American west, “One Battle After Another” moves with force and dynamism.
It’s no accident that so much of “One Battle After Another” takes place in that landscape, the one directors like John Ford made synonymous with America and progress. This is a film about progress and the lack thereof, how people’s priorities change as they get older and how they justify those changes to themselves.
At the beginning of the film, revolution is everything to Perfidia. It’s part of her lineage, it’s part of her belief system – but it’s also where she gets her rocks off. In one of her first scenes with Bob, she starts to touch herself while he explains the process of making a bomb. When she meets Lockjaw for the first time, she’s more interested in the fact that she can arouse him by pointing a gun at him than she is in ridding the world of his kind. This is fun for her, and she embodies the kind of energy you only really have when you’re young with no responsibilities.
Lockjaw himself is full of contradictions – a wannabe white supremacist who can’t help but feel attracted to Perfidia, despite the self-loathing it brings him. And she doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of him in any way she can, trying to find some sort of power in a relationship where she would otherwise have none.
When her daughter is born, there is a switch in Perfidia. The montages of explosions and robberies, as exciting as they are, also represent a sort of stasis. Bob’s priorities start to shift away from revolution and towards family, but Perfidia has trouble turning away. She hates the way her daughter was brought into this world, and she hates the fact that she might not have done enough to fix it before she got here. Feds fresh on their tails, Perfidia makes decisions that are heartbreakingly human, fueled by selfishness and fear.
Sixteen years after Perfidia makes the choices she does, the two men on either side of her are still reckoning with those choices. They could not be more different, and those differences are evidenced in the way they move – Bob’s loping, lopsided jog, a spring in his step even when he’s stoned out of his mind (and he often is), next to Lockjaw’s stiff, unyielding, upright posture.
And still, both men don’t really fit into the different worlds they’re trying to create. While trying to join a white nationalist group called the Christmas Adventurers, Lockjaw feels painfully out of place next to one of the group’s leaders, Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn). Their first meeting takes place at Virgil’s daughter’s wedding, tying back to another great movie about America, “The Godfather” – except this time, it’s not an Italian immigrant gangster doing the wheeling and dealing, but a guy who looks like John F. Kennedy if he were a fascist. For as much as Lockjaw is the ostensible villain, “One Battle After Another” never wavers on who it is actually making the decisions that ruin the world. Revolutionaries might keep to the underground, but the authoritarians – dressed in their Lacoste, ever and always polite – operate in the shadows as well.
Bob’s oddball status is more of a generational one. Hiding from the law for 16 years has turned him into a bit of a bumbling idiot – he has the, “Yo homie, is that my briefcase?” attitude of Tom Cruise in “Collateral” paired with the general vibe of Jeff Bridges in “The Big Lebowski.” If we hadn’t seen it at the beginning of the film, it would be tough to imagine this guy as one of the leaders of the revolution, and the younger set sees that.
Many of the movies mentioned earlier in this review are in part trying to figure out what to make of our younger generations – whether that be understandable worries over social media-based activism in “Eddington,” or Spike Lee’s rather endearing “old man yells at computer” vibe that’s all over “Highest 2 Lowest.” But Anderson seems to take a more hopeful view. Yes, Bob spends a rather long time yelling at a young revolutionary on the phone because Bob can’t remember how to prove his identity (at one point, he literally asks to speak to a manager). Yes, he sometimes gets confused about his daughter’s friends and what pronouns he should be using (but he is asking, and that’s half the battle).
But even with all these generational differences, Bob is able to eventually see in his daughter and others that there is hope. Maybe revolution isn’t what it used to be, but it’s important to note that this movie starts with Bob and his cohorts in their heyday before fast-forwarding almost 20 years to a future where nothing has changed. The older generation did what they could, but they failed. What they pass onto the next generation – what Bob and Perfidia pass onto Willa, and how she takes those lessons and evolves them – that’s the real core of what America can be.