Paul Thomas Anderon’s new movie, One Battle After Another, is an incredible feat on so many levels, but perhaps the biggest one is, for a hundred-million dollar movie made by Warner Bros., how unabashedly political it is.
It begins with the French 75, a leftist group of revolutionaries, breaking into an immigrant detention center that’s under the control of one Col. Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn). The leader of the group, a rash, but principled black woman named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) strictly gives their bomb expert, a stammering white guy named Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), orders before their mission. Later, Perfidia plays games (which I won’t get into here) with Lockjaw at gunpoint while the rest of her team get the immigrants out of the center. Lockjaw, an odd army man with a voice reminiscent of a certain current US secretary of health and human services, begins to have a deep sexual passion for Perfidia and follows her through her and her team’s political stands for much of the invigorating prologue of the film. However, as he’s masturbating to her holding a security guard at gunpoint, he notices that she and Pat are flirtatious with each other. Sure enough, we find out they’re married and have a deep love for each other. Lockjaw catches Perfidia in the act during one of their bombings and agrees to let her continue to go on as she has if she meets him that night. Eight months later, she’s fully pregnant. Pat seems unaware of what went down between her and Lockjaw, but another member of the team, Deandra (Regina Hall) might know more. As one would expect, one of their missions goes awry when Perfidia shoots a security guard. Lockjaw offers her her life if she’s willing to rat out the other members of her team, all of whom are killed in a rather jarring sequence. All except for Pat and Deandra.
Pat gets the new name of Bob Ferguson, and he and Perfidia’s baby daughter flee to start a new life. We then jump to sixteen years later (a fantastic cut, elevated by a Steely Dan needle drop) and see that Willa (Chase Infiniti) is now a teenager in the middle of a karate lesson with Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro). “Bob” is predictably protective of her, but Leo plays it so well in a scumbag-sort of way. Bob has lost his way, but Willa seems relatively well adjusted, though. That is until Col. Lockjaw is asked to join the Christmas Adventures Club (a vague secret society filled with white supremacists) and he realizes that his mixed-race potential-daughter is the only thing standing in his way. Willa is (temporarily) rescued from being apprehended by Lockjaw by Deandra while Bob has to navigate his way through one battle after another (ohhh…) to get back to her. High for most of it, he gets the call warning him that Lockjaw is coming for him mid-way through a joint. When Bob gets the call, the film really begins.
One Battle After Another moves with a propulsive pace (a difference between this and PTA’s previous few pictures) and it’s genuinely astonishing that it got made, but what makes it all the more astonishing is what the film is really about. As Bob seeks the help of Sensei Sergio, we see that Sergio’s in the middle of his own revolution, unrelated to Bob’s secret organization filled with somewhat pretentious passwords and self-righteousness. Sergio is busy getting illegal immigrants out of the area through secret tunnels, but Bob seems relatively uninterested in this. He’s focused on finding his daughter and less so with the protests out on the streets (“Let’s fight fire with fire” declares Lockjaw). One Battle After Another is less about a specific revolution and more about what it means to be a part of one. In the prologue, riveting as it is, it’s clear that at least a few members of the French 75 have forgotten what they’re really fighting for: the next generation. And future generations after that. It’s refreshing that sixteen years later, Bob doesn’t think that the revolution already happened and now it’s time for things to settle down, he thinks that it happened and they lost. The film is he and Willa’s journey to realizing that that isn’t true. Why did Bob get involved in bombing banks and power grids in the first place? If not a little for the thrill, mostly for the next generation. His daughter. That becomes clear to him throughout the film.
However, it’s not all politics. In fact, One Battle After Another has perhaps more interesting and heart-pounding set pieces than anything you’ll find in most other blockbuster entertainment right now. PTA isn’t afraid to think outside the box in his “action” scenes because Bob isn’t your typical action hero. He gets hurt, he jumps and falls, he trips, but it’s this that makes these sequences interesting in a way they wouldn’t be if Bob had an eight-pack. PTA’s inspirations for this film can be seen in a few Coen Bros. movies, but there’s also a noticeable amount of Midnight Run in this film (the 1988 film directed by Martin Brest). Midnight Run doesn’t have the coolest shootouts or the most bad-ass explosions, but we keep watching because we love the main characters. All of that can also be said for One Battle After Another.
Every performance is well-calculated by the actors, but the screenplay cannot go unmentioned. PTA breathes so much life into his characters through his scripts and One Battle After Another is no exception. After the prologue, the film really only takes place over the course of 24 hours (give or take), but it feels monumental due to how much every character feels lived-in. When the Christmas Adventurers club hires an assassin to carry out a mission, you wonder where he’s been for the previous hour and a half of the film. It also cannot go unmentioned that the film was shot in glorious Vistavision (something not done since 1962), which helps to elevate every close-up an actor has.
Much like every PTA movie (with the exception of my personal favorite, Punch Drunk Love), One Battle After Another’s two-hour and forty-minute runtime is nothing to scoff at, but as previously mentioned, the film’s pace is so propulsive and you get so lost in it that it’ll fly by. When the final needle drop kicked in and the credits declared “written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson” my first thought was “I need to see this again.” And I’m sure I will, over and over. If One Battle After Another’s greatest feat is how political it is, its second is most certainly how, despite that, most people will fall for it. See it big. See it loud. Because that’s what this movie deserves.
