Leonardo DiCaprio leads a sterling cast in Paul Thomas Anderson’s singularly bold thriller, One Battle After Another. Our review: One Battle After Another is the closest Paul Thomas Anderson has yet come to making a pure action thriller. A middle-aged man with a particular set of skills finds his past catching up with him, endangering ... One Battle After Another review | PTA fights the powers that be
Leonardo DiCaprio leads a sterling cast in Paul Thomas Anderson’s singularly bold thriller, One Battle After Another. Our review:
One Battle After Another is the closest Paul Thomas Anderson has yet come to making a pure action thriller. A middle-aged man with a particular set of skills finds his past catching up with him, endangering the safety of his teenage daughter. But what if our protagonist found that, after years in obscurity, his set of skills had gotten rather rusty? What if, after extended bouts of drink and drugs, he wasn’t much of a hero at all?
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, the former member of a leftist gang of revolutionaries in what feels like a heightened alternate version of the United States: ultra right-wing, militarised, and not a million miles away from our present-day reality. In his late 20s, Bob was an amateur explosives expert, passionately in love with his freedom fighter partner Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), with whom he ran a string of raids on immigrant detention centres on the Mexico border. But during one of those raids, Perfidia fatefully encounters the centre’s commanding officer, one Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who immediately becomes lust-struck and obsessed with her. It’s an obsession that leads to a violent counter-terrorist operation against Bob’s militants, dubbed the French 75, forcing them to scatter across the US.
So begins a meandering, mesmerising trip through time, with Anderson picking up with Bob again sixteen years later, now in hiding with his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), who he’s raised by himself. Now a hard-drinking stoner, Bob cuts a hapless figure: a singularly awful parent, he lives in a constant state of paranoia, refusing to let his daughter own a smartphone and closely monitoring the friends she hangs out with (“They drive around in a red car? A little loud, isn’t it?”). Then, one day, Bob’s darkest fears are borne out, and he’s forced to reconnect with his old compatriots.
This, at any rate, is One Battle After Another in its most skeletal terms. Very loosely adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon, it’s a chaotic, tonally kaleidoscopic mix of drama, political thriller, slacker comedy and dystopian nightmare. Its 160-minute duration is packed with eccentric side-characters and curious locations, creating an off-kilter temperature reading of a United States sleepwalking into fascism.
Coincidentally, its mix of broad performances and deadpan, objective camerawork recalls Ari Aster’s Eddington, which also explored political polarisation in 21st century America. But Anderson is far less coy about where his sympathies lie here. From Lockjaw on down, his right-wing characters are roundly pathetic – obsessed with racial purity, precise haircuts and secret clubs with absurd names. His left-wing dissidents, on the other hand, are clumsy, occasionally petty, but essentially good-hearted – their prime failing is that they’re too disorganised, too Dad’s Army to really pose a true threat to the current regime.
DiCaprio’s Bob, as addled and out of shape as his, is essentially a decent guy who, deep down, hopes his lost love will come back and be a mother to their daughter again. With his bloodshot eyes and gnawing air of life having passed him by, Bob isn’t a million miles away from Rick Dalton, the aging actor he played in Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood. There’s also a similar air of tension over whether his character can possibly rise to the challenges the plot throws in his path.
Newcomer Chase Infiniti is equally striking as Willa – one of those wise-beyond-their years teenage characters who’s generally the smartest person in any given scene. The script asks a lot of her character, physically and emotionally; that she can hold the screen even when sharing it with seasoned actors like Penn and DiCaprio is a sign of her skill.
(In smaller but memorable roles, there’s also Benicio del Toro’s Taekwondo instructor, Sergio, who constantly has a tin of beer in his hand and seems utterly unflappable, even when the cops are on his tail; Regina Hall as one of Bob’s more competent old conspirators; and Tony Goldwyn as one of several moneyed, lizardlike white supremacists.)
In some respects, One Battle After Another is familiar territory for Anderson. It’s his second Pynchon adaptation, following 2014’s Inherent Vice. Like that film, it offers up another curious landscape of weirdos and outsiders, again featuring a score by Jonny Greenwood, who wrote similarly loping, percussive sonic backdrops for Anderson’s past four films. But One Battle After Another has an irresistible propulsiveness that Inherent Vice lacked, and like Anderson’s best work, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood, it elides between tones, moods and even genres with seemingly effortless skill.
Anderson has the flexibility to move from moments that border on outright comedy to moments of incredible tension and back, sometimes within seconds. Together with co-cinematographer Michael Bauman, shooting in a boxy Vistavision format, he creates some truly captivating images: an antifascist demonstration at night, illuminated by fire. A crisply-framed pair of shots, spaced over an hour apart, which hint that Willa might have some of her mother’s revolutionary fire in her belly. There’s also a high-speed sequence involving undulating desert roads that is so original, and so ingeniously staged, that it will almost certainly be stolen by a Bond or Fast And Furious movie over the next few years.
Beneath the eccentricity, the bleak humour and tension, One Battle After Another digs away at the intolerance and deep-seated, almost exclusively white power structures that have long underpinned America. Arriving at a time where thousands of people have been held in solitary confinement by the US’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, the film’s images of families packed into cages feels chillingly of the moment.
Along with Eddington and The Long Walk, Anderson’s thriller is the work of another filmmaker seemingly frightened and disgusted at their country’s direction of travel. The filmmaker at least offers the hope that a younger generation of idealists – as represented by Willa – can still change the world for the better. But as One Battle After Another also points out, fascism is a tenacious weed that is difficult to remove once it’s taken root.
One Battle After Another is in UK cinemas from the 26th September.
