'One Battle After Another' Review
While PTA's newest film isn't a masterpiece, it still hits
No one would confuse Paul Thomas Anderson with being a political filmmaker. Though his films have covered big picture topics: craven bootstrapping (There Will Be Blood) and the danger behind cults of personalities (The Master and Magnolia)—he wouldn’t be your first choice to direct a contemporary critique of the fascist state. And yet, One Battle After Another, a kinetic, fast-charging evisceration of present-day America is one of the more cogent political statements delivered by a major American filmmaker mostly because it capably blends the director’s personal quirks with an equally idiosyncratic approach.
PTA’s proposal here is to make a star vehicle without a vehicle. Because while Leonardo DiCaprio’s is the film’s top-of-the-marquee star, playing explosives expert Bob Ferguson, he isn’t our gallant hero. In fact, at every turn, the film makes overt moves to ridicule and minimize him into a hapless jester whose revolutionary spirit is as shallow as a puddle. Instead the film is split into three parts, with each section defined by a Black woman.
Ferguson is a member of the French 75, a revolutionary group akin to the Weather Underground, and is partners with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). The latter is the careening engine of the film’s riotous opening section wherein the French 75 liberate an American detention center holding undocumented families. The group, composed of Alana Haim, Wood Harris, Shayna McHayle aka Junglepussy, and Regina Hall— efficiently wind through the opposing force, with shots seemingly smashing into one another. Perfidia moves separately and furiously, facing down Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) by sexually arousing, commanding him to force an erection, before emasculating him. The confrontation enraptures him and emboldens her. She is the kind of fervent and charged Angela Davis inspired liberator Ferguson can barely imagine himself as.
Nevertheless, for inexplicable reasons, the pair are an item. Their union eventually leads to Perfidia becoming a mother, a role that doesn’t fit her quite as well as being a revolutionary. Looking for payback and more, Lockjaw also re-enters the picture, allowing PTA to express his own attraction to Black women (if you don’t know already, he and Maya Rudolph have been together for 25 years and have three kids). Many of these moments are winking, some others are brazenly overt, leaning on DiCaprio’s oafish expressions and Penn’s grunting George C. Scott impression to sell joke after joke about being aroused by Black women.
Surprisingly these sequences aren’t luring. My primary issue with Licorice Pizza, for instance, stemmed both from many of its filmic references being not reinventions but shameless pastiche and the gaze of the camera, particularly the way it looks at Iyana Halley in the wig and waterbed store, which seemed to leap beyond the character to the film itself exoticizing her. Here the camera and dialogue appear to be far more attuned to projecting lust without being purely lascivious. It’s that lust, combined with Perfidia’s postpartum distress, that instigates both the crumbling of the French 75 and Ferguson fleeing with his and Perfidia’s daughter to rural California, where they hide for 16 years until Lockjaw—whose prospects of being inducted into an illuminati-coded society is at risk due to his past dealings with Perfidia—disrupts their isolated life.
For DiCaprio, Ferguson is a continuation of his streak playing idiot White men (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Don’t Look Up, Killers of the Flower Moon). Somehow each iteration is better than the last, particularly here because he’s both a dumb dad and a substandard revolutionary. Ferguson spends much of his days lounging around, smoking weed and getting drunk. In comparison, his daughter Willa (an unbelievable Chase Infiniti) appears to be far more level-headed and adult-minded. So when Lockjaw arrives, causing Deandra (Regina Hall) to swoop and take Willa on the lam, Ferguson is utterly helpless. He doesn’t remember any of the passcodes that allow him to communicate with the resistance and can barely charge the antiquated phone that was provided to him.
Nimble and committed, DiCaprio reminds you that he’s a great physical comedian as he bends around corners and crawls across floors toward the door of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (an amazing Benicio Del Toro). In this second section there is a wonderful juxtaposition that shows how capable the people of color are around Ferguson and how incapable he is. Deandra springs into action, moving with an assuredness that makes you wish Hall had significantly more screen time (she’s the one character that isn’t fully shaped). On the other hand Sensei, brings in his own underground network to rise to the moment, looking out for many of the local undocumented people (the great trick of this film is showing how cyclical America’s xenophobia is). Meanwhile, DiCaprio keeps things comedically moving by being a blubbering idiot.
Of course, if PTA’s intention was structure this film around three Black women then the second act certainly comes up short. As I said Hall is barely in the film. And though her resoluteness and presence casts a long shadow, her and Infiniti’s fleeing on the road is the side plot to DiCaprio’s buffoonery. You could also accuse the film of colorism, in that darker skinned women are reduced to side characters or become villainous while its light-skinned lead remains virtuous, even if the film might be aligning with PTA’s own potential insecurities about being a white man raising a biracial child. Before long, Infiniti does ultimately come to dominate the film’s loopy third act, wherein Jonny Greenwood’s snappy jazz-inflected score changes from its spy movie clothes into something much more ragged and harrowing amid the panoramic desert vistas shot with immeasurable scope and tight precision by Michael Bauman.
One Battle After Another is anti a great many things: ICE, fascism, and capitalism—without ever making direct speeches about them (though Taylor does make grand, vocal calls to burn down the government). As many others have commented, it’s incredible that a major studio produced this, recalling Hollywood used to make subversive work like The Spook Who Sat By the Door, which as Marya E. Gates has pointed out on Letterboxd, this movie is that by way of Ishtar. And while Penn can wear thin channeling Scott, even his subplot makes a salient point that in the past new world orders needed the military’s backing to control the world. Now, even the military is fighting for a spot at a shrinking table. So what does that say about the grave danger we’re already hurting from?
Having said all that, One Battle After Another is ultimately a total dad movie. It plays on the belief that all fathers are all dedicated people whose love outweighs their stupidity. In that sense, then, on top of being an espionage road movie, PTA’s latest is also a coming-of-age flick, albeit a wacky, knotty one that says much about PTA’s own fixations about his fatherhood. How do you protect your children in a world aiming to erase their very existence? How do you imagine a future for them when said future has already been bought from under them? While One Battle After Another finds a genial path forward, it remains, at its core, a fight the power clarion call demanding the young to live out the words of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin.’”
The battle outside ragin’/Will soon shake your windows/And rattle your walls/For the times they are a-changin’