Eleven years after Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson once again adapts Thomas Pynchon with One Battle After Another, a very loose reworking of the author’s Vineland that boasts many of the same strengths and weaknesses of the director’s prior act of translation.
Impeccably crafted and intensely timely, Anderson’s action-oriented drama is a propulsive and visceral tale of revolution, family, and the means by which autocracies attempt to corrupt from within, energized by a frantic Leonardo DiCaprio and a sadistic Sean Penn. As with his stoner detective odyssey, the auteur’s latest, in theaters Sept. 26, is heavier on commotion than character, “craziness” than outright comedy. However, electrified by virtuoso filmmaking, its enraged message comes through loud and clear.
In an unidentified place and time that eerily resemble California circa today, Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) joins a group of domestic rebels to wreak havoc on an America in the throes of totalitarianism. This group is known as “The French 75,” and for Bob, his ardor for insurgency is matched by his love for cohort Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), whose name is one of many elements that’s too absurd for the realistic mayhem at hand and yet not quite wild enough to elicit a chuckle.
Bob and Perfidia are a couple dedicated to attacking the “imperialist state of this fascist regime,” and during their siege of an immigrant detention center to free inmates, Perfidia neutralizes Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) by making him stimulate an erection before zip-tying his hands and stealing his hat, stating on her way out that this is “a declaration of war.”
(Warning: Minor spoilers follow.)
That it is, but the grimacing Lockjaw finds the fearless, fiery Perfidia—the embodiment of everything he detests—irresistible, and he’s soon spying on her in his free time. During another operation, Lockjaw corners Perfidia and sets up an intimate rendezvous which she attends, and in the aftermath of their tryst, Perfidia and Bob welcome into their lives a baby daughter, Willa.
The new mother may believe that “Revolutionary violence is the only way,” yet as she demonstrates, there are many methods of inflicting harm on others. Opting to abandon Bob and Willa and, moreover, to rat out her compatriots in exchange for a witness protection life she promptly flees, Perfidia proves the complicated heart of One Battle After Another, torn between the cause, her loved ones, her ideals, and her destructive desires.
Fifteen years later, Bob has abandoned his fight to raise the teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) in a remote house where he smokes weed that exacerbates his titanic paranoia. Against all odds, he’s done an amazing job raising Willa, who studies martial arts at a “ninja academy” run by sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), and who has little patience for her father’s overbearing suspiciousness, which extends to her attending a school dance with friends.
He’s right to be on edge, since Lockjaw catches wind of Willa’s whereabouts and tries to abduct her. Luckily for the girl, she’s whisked away from trouble at the last second by Bob and Perfidia’s old compatriot Deandra (Regina Hall). When Bob hears what’s taken place, he frantically strives to reunite with his daughter—the problem being that he can’t remember the coded phrases he has to provide to his rebel hotline in order to receive intel.
Bob’s continuing frustration with the “nitpicky” French 75 operator is One Battle After Another’s funniest recurring bit, granting DiCaprio excellent opportunities to dial his character’s panic and mania to 10.
In a flannel robe and wool cap, his face covered in a scraggly mustache and soul patch and his eyes glazed to an almost dangerous degree, Bob is a messy, madcap protagonist who cares less about tearing down the world than protecting his offspring from Lockjaw. He’s an endearing over-the-hill radical, if caught, like the proceedings themselves, between the silly and the serious.
More assured is Penn as the psychotic military man, who secretly covets what he hates, and—because he’s on the cusp of being admitted into a secret, omnipotent cabal of upper-crust racists known as The Christmas Adventurers’ Club—is desperate to cover up his cardinal sin by locating and eliminating Willa.
With an expression that suggests he’s straining to bottle up his neurotic rage, and a herky-jerky gait that says everything about his pent-up condition, Penn is magnificent in One Battle After Another, offering up a scathing, psychologically incisive portrait of hypocritical right-wing screwiness.
Anderson, however, is less successful at imagining Bob and Willa as more than two-dimensional pawns in a rollicking game of search and rescue. Infiniti is a charismatic screen presence, but Willa is an empty shell, and that goes double for Hall’s non-entity Deandra and del Toro’s Sergio, who’s a plot device given a single weirdo opportunity to shine when, while pulled over by the police, he slow-mo prances about with maximum insolence.
The sketchiness of the story’s main players undercuts its of-the-moment critique, as well as stymies the type of engagement which might lend its concluding moments a truly nerve-wracking or moving power.
Fortunately, One Battle After Another compensates for such thinness with breathtaking formal beauty. Partnering with cinematographer Michael Bauman, Anderson balances restless close-ups with jouncing handheld, peaking with a climactic car chase along a rising-and-dipping desert road.
Regular collaborator Jonny Greenwood maintains the material’s anxious mood with a score of jazzy, discordant piano and unpredictable percussion that echoes Bob and Lockjaw’s harried states of mind. From a purely formal standpoint, Anderson’s tenth feature is as accomplished as anything he’s produced, and in 70mm IMAX, it has an aesthetic depth and vibrancy that’s frequently overwhelming.
One Battle After Another is a gonzo antifa rallying cry that contends, ultimately, that there’s nothing worth fighting for more than one’s kin—and that doing so will, in turn, instill them with the passion to carry on the war against tyranny.
Consequently, it’s feverishly attuned to the simmering fury of 2025 America. For all its revolutionary fervor, though, it falls short of the urgent poignancy and humor that might have made it a film to adore rather than just greatly admire—a state of affairs that, in the end, renders it a battle that’s only partially won.
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