“One Battle After Another,” the name of Paul Thomas Anderson’s invigorating political thriller, would also make a fine title for the history of humankind. Whenever I catch myself wishing I’d lived in a calmer era, I’m oddly soothed by asking, Like, when?
Every generation scuffles for something: suffrage, equality, autonomy, decent health, fair pay, even the right to keep on fighting. When Thomas Pynchon published his 1990 novel “Vineland,” a decades-spanning saga about a band of dope-smoking militant hippies from the ’60s to the Reagan Era, he seemed resigned that the counterculture had lost the struggle to free America’s soul, writing that after Watergate, “the personnel changed, the Repression went on, growing wider, deeper, and less visible.”
Yet, Paul Thomas Anderson’s fun and fizzy adaptation views its Molotov cocktail as half-full. Yes, it says, the struggle for liberation continues: ideologues versus toadies, radicals versus conservatives, loyalists versus rats. But isn’t it inspiring that there are still people willing to fight?
“Battle,” which Anderson also wrote, charts a fictional revolutionary group called the French 75 across 16 years. Headed by the volatile Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), its ranks include Lady Champagne (Regina Hall), Mae West (Alana Haim), Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle) and Ghetto Pete, a.k.a. Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), Perfidia’s lover and the future father of her child, Willa, played by the very good Chase Infiniti later in the film as a teen. Under Perfidia’s rapacious leadership, the French 75 does it all, busting immigrants out of detention centers, detonating politicians’ campaign headquarters and shorting out the electricity grid. The dates in which the story starts and stops are deliberately left vague; the movie feels like it was filmed tomorrow.
Surely in the century-plus history of cinema, other actors have created characters as sexy, powerful and hot-headed as Taylor’s Perfidia, nine months pregnant and blasting away with an automatic rifle, but I’m not sure anyone else has ever packaged all three with such potency. You believe she could give what Pynchon teasingly refers to as a “Kunoichi death kiss.”
Her rebel leader dominates the first act, making DiCaprio’s Bob look like a piddly, ponytailed follower barely fit to lick her combat boot. “Impress me,” she tells him early on, and he never seems to. (Secure in his playboy status, DiCaprio is always at his best playing pathetic clowns like “The Wolf of Wall Street’s” later-stage Jordan Belfort. Tom Cruise runs; he collapses and crawls.) A beat later, Perfidia barges into the office of lickspittle Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to harass and humiliate him. Yikes, she inadvertently unlocks the colonel’s all-consuming erotic fetish.
The repellent Lockjaw, biceps as hard and swollen as roadkill armadillos, vows to stalk Perfidia until he can bend her to his will — he gets turned on when she bosses him around like a bad puppy. He’s a dogmatic submissive, an inner tension illustrated by Penn to marvelous effect when Lockjaw shows up at Perfidia’s door with flowers and, when she doesn’t answer, returns with a battering ram. Pynchon describes his version of the character as a “little guy with a jocklike walk.” Penn makes him strut like he’s got a flagpole up his rear.
Naturally, Lockjaw hates DiCaprio’s Bob and he’s not enthused to see Perfidia become a mother. Neither is she. “Go do the revolution, baby,” Bob says as Perfidia marches out the door, her postpartum depression urging her to prove that she’s more than an aching body shackled to a baby. Clutching the infant to his chest, Bob doesn’t realize that, in a decade and a half, he’ll be a single dad in hiding and the uprising he fought for — and that some of his friends died for — looks like a fizzle. Perfidia’s past, as in Lockjaw, will come for him and Willa, forcing the father-daughter pair to hit the road separately and trust that the other has the training to survive. Bob won’t exactly rise to the occasion. He will, however, fall 40 feet off a building.
Calling “Battle” a version of “Vineland” is generous. The film feels like Anderson left a spliff at Pynchon’s altar and then, in the spirit of rebellion, went off and did his own thing. They’ve got similar comic, sexual and ethical kinks (both delight in pervy slapstick), but “Battle’s” sensibility and spine are all Anderson.
He’s reoriented the story and its characters around race, and it’s worth mentioning that Bob and Perfidia’s blended family looks a bit like Anderson’s own with wife and actor Maya Rudolph. (An aside where Bob confesses that he hasn’t learned how to do Willa’s hair is small, perfect and painful.) Like a bartender making the modern version of the French 75 itself — a WWI-era cocktail saluting the anti-aircraft gun that helped the Allied forces win the war — Anderson knows you can change key ingredients, grenadine for Champagne, the DEA for ICE, while still giving the Man a headache.
Meanwhile, Lockjaw’s Perfidia fixation chafes against his desire to join a clique of snooty white nationalists invented for the film called the Christmas Adventurers Club. (Their hilarious catchphrase is too good to spoil.) The hair and makeup teams have taken care to make sure that all of these well-connected bigots look ghastly in their own wretched skin and the same goes for the members of a redneck militia with tattoos up to their hairline. These guys are no advertisement for genetic supremacy.
Combine “There Will Be Blood’s” voracious oil baron and “The Master’s” manipulative spiritual guru with this movie’s America-first nativists and you have Anderson’s unholy trinity of characters who have corrupted our founders’ ideals. Usually, Anderson allows us to find our own path through his epics. But “Battle” draws crisp, unmistakable lines, I think because Anderson loathes Lockjaw most of all. You can tell because unlike Daniel Day-Lewis’ Daniel Plainview or Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, he and Penn refuse to give the creep any charisma. It’s not only that Lockjaw is a racist, it’s that he backs racist policies primarily for his own benefit. He’s a soulless hypocrite, another of today’s clout-seeking grifters. Menacing as Lockjaw can be chasing after Willa with a monomania that feels nearly Terminator-esque, he’s still as pitiful as hapless Pete.
Much of the plot boils down to various factions trying to protect or eradicate Willa, the inheritor of Perfidia’s destructive DNA, while Jonny Greenwood’s marvelously uneasy score of pounding piano, sounding at once improvised and insistent, hammers away as if trying to remember its own tune. Likewise, Bob can’t recall the code words he needs to ask the underground for help: “I’ve fried my brain, man,” he moans.
The idea that anyone, even Infiniti’s plucky proto-guerilla, is special in a perpetual war against oppression is a minor discordance in the script, along with a small character’s moral turn that’s a bit too convenient. Besides, the whole point is that humanity’s existential fight isn’t coming — it’s already here — and the immigration raid pretexts that Lockjaw uses to get his soldiers mobilized means a lot of people, particularly Black and brown ones, get hurt in the margins of the movie.
But Anderson doesn’t go for pathos. He and editor Andy Jurgensen keep the tenor strictly rat-a-tat, so his riskiest choice is that he trusts we’ll feel awful about these scapegoats even without close-ups of teary faces behind bars. Instead, he shows us a glimpse of bored, incarcerated kids tossing a wadded-up foil blanket in their cage and that image alone packs a wallop.
Just as playful and pointed are our extended scenes with Benicio del Toro’s indomitable Sergio St. Carlos, Willa’s karate teacher and something of a 21st century Harriet Tubman for undocumented workers. Cinematographer Michael Bauman puts together a gorgeous, silhouetted shot of St. Carlos’ skateboarding scouts vaulting over rooftops in front of a building lit up to look like the American flag. Between Del Toro’s two rampaging performances here and in this year’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” I’m convinced there’s nothing nicer than gliding in his wake as he barges through the world.
Despite the testosterone in the title, no one in “One Battle After Another” throws a mano a mano punch. The violence is large, state-like and looming, and when it bears down on an individual, it’s as impersonal as a bullet. Characters in this movie surface and get dragged away. Some are big names, some of our favorites don’t get a name at all. The churn goes on, relentless.
Surely, you think, when we get to the denouement, Anderson will put a few words on the screen letting us know if everyone is OK. He doesn’t and that’s his most galvanizing move. To knot these plot threads together would imply a sense of finality that he doesn’t believe in. To him, it’s more important to underline that the progress is a team effort. Like that title insists, others will take over from the fallen. They always have.
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