From car chases to reefer-smoking nuns, One Battle After Another has it all. Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterpiece is a carnivalesque tour of radical protest in the American context seen through a father-daughter relationship.
Sixteen years ago, members of the leftist militant group French 75 scattered after their latest act of insurrection failed. Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) turned in some of her comrades and disappeared, leaving behind her husband Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti).
In the present, a frequently stoned and/or drunk Bob is struggling with single parenthood. When military colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) comes looking for Willa, Bob must get his act together, teaming up with karate teacher Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) and French 75 member Deandre (Regina Hall) to rescue his daughter.
French 75’s reputation holds Bob in good stead with nearly everybody. His brain fried by narcotics, Bob struggles to remember the all-important password that will unlock access to French 75’s bureaucratic network.
There’s always room for satire and screwball comedy in Anderson’s screenplay, inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland. Some of the characters are caricatures – the overly sexualised Perfidia, the shambolic Bob, the clench-jawed Lockjaw, Sergio’s exaggerated sensei. Whom the rebels are up against, however, is a laughing matter only for extreme cynics.
Can it really be called betrayal when the crackdown is so brutal, the personal cost so high? And what explains the persistence of dissent, which has found new avenues of expression? Chaos is the one constant in a film that’s epic as well as intimate, brutal while also tender, very funny but sad too.
A scene from Gillo Pontecorvo’s classic The Battle of Algiers (1966) plays on a television as a measure of the distance between the romanticism of rebellion and the harsh reality of waging war on an indefatigable enemy. There is on-the-nose signalling at times. Could Perfidia have behaved in any other way, given her name? One of Willa’s tormentors has “relentless” tattooed on his forehead.
One Battle After Another is relentless too, with action set pieces and explosions around every corner. The 164-minute film is constantly moving in horizontal, vertical and forward directions.
Cinematographer Michael Bauman, who has shot the gorgeous-looking film on 35mm stock with wide-screen format cameras, careens between the underground and the overground, tunnels and the streets. One sequence plays out on the undulating concrete ribbons of a highway, turning a regular vehicle chase into a stunning piece of visual poetry.
The poignant father-daughter bond is at the heart of a tightly controlled chronicle of men and women out of control, expertly edited by Andy Jurgensen. Debutant actor Chase Infiniti is striking as Willa, while a bunch of secondary actors deftly play characters on either side of the ideological divide.
Leonardo DiCaprio is in brilliant form as the earnest, ageing revolutionary who is still committed to the cause – if only he can remember that dratted password. DiCaprio hasn’t been this good since The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro are superb too, both deadly funny and deadly effective when they need to be.
In the grand sweep of the narrative, individual scenes linger in memory. Perfidia and Bob with an infant Willa. Sergio dancing on a highway. Lockjaw being menacing with Willa. A sudden good turn done to Willa by somebody unexpected because of his own history of violence. Rebels everywhere, crawling out of the woodwork, challenging the might of the American government.
Anti-establishment sentiment leapfrogs between the generations, from a failed rebellion undone by betrayal to a new one soldered by loyalty. There are grace notes in defeat, giving the film a timely as well as a timeless quality.
