Bob Ferguson, the protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another, is a familiar sort of burnout. He’s a single dad shambling around his secluded California home, watching old movies and smoking weed while he fuzzily recalls his salad days as a revolutionary. He doesn’t own a cellphone, and he barks angrily at his teenage daughter’s friends when they come up his driveway. His paranoia, played with clumsy charm by a mustachioed and bleary-eyed Leonardo DiCaprio, is half-cocked and somewhat comical. But Bob’s behavior, One Battle After Another argues, is also entirely justified because of the terrifying brutality of the world—a reality that crashes into Bob’s hazy reverie to create an electrifying, thoughtful blockbuster.
The credits cite as inspiration Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, a tale concerned with the entropy of 1960s radicalism. One Battle After Another does have the same basic plot setup as that book: A hippie finds himself and his child in the sights of an outrageous government adversary. But the movie spins in wildly different directions. The most important change is that the events are now set in the present day. Anderson doesn’t portray Bob, an alias that the character assumes after going into hiding, as a crusty leftover from an earlier era. Instead, he’s a former paramilitary vigilante who waged war against a fascist-leaning government more than a decade ago, freeing migrants from federal camps and bombing law enforcement as part of an insurgency group called the French 75.
Anderson’s willingness to touch such a raw nerve is astonishing. One Battle After Another feels urgent against the backdrop of a country debating the complexities of political violence and government overreach into its criminal-justice system. That’s especially true when compared with the director’s usual, backward-looking fare, which has dominated his oeuvre during the past two decades. Instead of contemporary settings, he’s previously turned to contexts such as the oil boom of the early 20th century (There Will Be Blood), early-’70s California (Inherent Vice), and high-society London in the ’50s (Phantom Thread). His most recent movie, Licorice Pizza, was an oft-gorgeous but almost myopic look at a Hollywood of yesteryear.
One Battle After Another is Licorice Pizza’s opposite: a bleak, captivating vision of modern times as seen through the eyes of someone who tried to beat off the dread, then eventually gave up the fight. The film’s first section condenses Bob’s origin story into a kinetic action thriller: He was once an explosives expert known as “Ghetto Pat” who quickly fell in love with one of the French 75’s fiercest warriors, Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor). We watch as they become parents, before Perfidia quickly declares herself too independent for domestic life. Instead, she becomes more reckless in her guerrilla campaign against the Army operative Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an avowed white supremacist. As Lockjaw descends on them, the group relocates Bob and his daughter to California, gives them new names, and tells them to lie low.
All of that is just the opening salvo of the film, delivered with breakneck assurance by Anderson. I could barely believe what I was witnessing; Anderson tends to work at a slow, moody, unapologetically arty pace. Think of There Will Be Blood’s drawn-out, almost-wordless prelude; the pregnant pauses of Punch-Drunk Love; the languid obsessiveness of Phantom Thread: None of that patience is present at the outset of One Battle After Another.
When we flash forward to Bob’s life as a retired radical, however, a little more of Anderson’s shaggy humor rears its head. DiCaprio is a perfect vessel for that sensibility—he’s still plausible as the youthful action hero of the first chunk of the film, but he’s also loaded with pathos and expert comic timing as an older, crabbier Bob. His daughter, Willa (the luminous Chase Infiniti, in her first film), is affectionate but short with him. Yet for all of his stoned foolishness, Bob has clearly imparted a real distrust of authority to his kid. His parenting pays off grandly when Lockjaw returns to try to devastate their lives once again.
I won’t say much more about the plot, which is somehow sprawling and taut at the same time. The film clocks in at nearly three hours but feels half as long. And though all of Anderson’s artistry and jittery comedic sensibility is present, the director hasn’t created a pretentious version of an action flick; One Battle After Another is the real thing, filled with beautifully shot car chases and shoot-outs. (An extended sequence in which Bob tries to escape a literal siege on his hometown with the help of his daughter’s karate teacher, played by Benicio del Toro, had me ready to fall out of my seat.) The most impressive part of the director’s approach is how well he melds the genre storytelling with its commentary on the tension between committing to a life as a true renegade and trying to safely raise a child in America. The movie gives its characters a lot to do, not just points to make.
One Battle After Another is rife with big ideas, but it’s never didactic; it’s too committed to emotionally investing the audience. Penn, giving a brilliant performance of cold villainy that could win him a third Oscar, is unafraid of lancing the inherent goofiness of a fascist. DiCaprio plays Bob as a sweetheart rather than a buffoon; he’s a tired, strung-out antihero made weary not by his yearslong efforts to fight back but by the relentlessness of the world. The whole movie is similarly daunted by how dark our current political battles have become, yet it strains for optimism throughout. Yes, an all-powerful government might be sending soldiers to its citizens’ doorstep, but One Battle After Another is about once-dispirited people searching for the will to best and survive them—perhaps regardless of whether their means are moral. More often than not, they succeed. So, too, does the film: It’s an emotional, visceral triumph.
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