American Girl
My thoughts on One Battle After Another
When Nashville, Robert Altman’s sprawling cinematic state of the union address observing an America teetering on the edge of chaos in the wake of political, economic and spiritual upheaval, was released into theaters just over a half-century ago riding an immense wave of pre-release hype and anticipation, the posters announced—truthfully, as it turned out—that was “The Damndest Thing You Ever Saw.” Now comes One Battle After Another, the latest work from acclaimed filmmaker (and avowed Altman acolyte) Paul Thomas Anderson and while it may not have any direct ties towards that earlier film, it is one that could have easily utilized that very same tag line. Here is a work of crazy-pants audacity that has been fueled with a wild independent spirit, funded by a massive corporate entity on a level usually reserved for sure-thing four-quadrant blockbusters and feels so completely of the moment in terms of what it is saying about the state of the world at this particularly bizarre moment that it feels as if they entire thing was somehow written, produced and put together entirely within the last week or two. At the same time, it also manages to be hilarious, thrilling and oddly touching in equal measure, offers up an array of knockout performances from a cast consisting of well-established stars and fascinating newcomers and manages to hold you so completely enraptured for every moment of its 160 minutes that it will leave you wondering if you really saw what you just saw or had somehow dreamed it all up in your mind.
What it isn’t, I should probably establish up front, is an adaptation—at least not in the classical sense—of Vineland, the acclaimed satirical 1990 novel by the great and mysterious author Thomas Pynchon. During the secretive production of the film, there were rumors that Anderson, who had previously brought the work of Pynchon to the screen with his fascinating film version of Inherent Vice, was actually doing an adaptation of that book, which explored the revolutionary nature of the 60s and how those promises failed to take hold from the perspective of former revolutionaries in the midst of the Reagan era, but while it does get a prominent citation in the end credits, very little of what was on the page has made it into the film (which will probably not come as a surprise to anyone who actually read it). Instead, what Anderson has done is create something that has the feel of a Pynchon work—primarily in its cheerful absurdism and offbeat narrative structure—but at the same time contains plenty of the ideas and sensibilities that he has explored throughout the course of his own significant career, closer to something like David Cronenberg’s not-quite take on William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch than what he did with the relatively straightforward (at least by Pynchon standards) Inherent Vice.
Beginning more or less in the present day, the film opens with an insurgent group known as the French 75 as they prepare to lay siege to an immigrant detention facility. One of the new members of the group is Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), a munitions guy whose job in the action is to create a display of fireworks and flares designed to distract the soldiers guarding the place while others, such as the fire-breathing revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), go about springing the prisoners and subduing those in charge. One of those in charge is Lt. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a hard-core military type who, like Pat, is instantly besotted with Perfidia from the moment he sees her, which she quickly takes advantage of by pressing his buttons, so to speak, to demonstrate her control over him. With Bob, she is a little less cruel but those two soon begins an affair that she punctuates with clandestine meetings with Lockjaw, who has been obsessively following the activities of the French 75 and who is torn between his desire for her (complete with a pronounced humiliation fetish) and his white supremacist leanings. Before too long, Perfidia gives birth to a daughter, Charlene, but while Pat believes that it is time to put their days of pushing the revolution in the streets so that they can begin to raise a family, she is not willing to stop when there is so much injustice in the world. Unfortunately for her, a bank robbery committed by the group goes violently wrong and she ends up getting arrested. Faced with significant prison time, the formerly unapologetic radical rats out her comrades and they are either disposed of or go underground while she vanishes.
After this extended opening sequence, which contains enough memorable action (including the first of a number of gripping car chases) and imagery (such as a heavily pregnant Perfidia firing off a machine gun) to make it the most genuinely thrilling film of the year just on its own, One Battle After Another moves forward in time by 16 years, though nothing really seems to have changed during that leap—people have gotten older, the rich and powerful have become richer and more powerful and everyone else is struggling to get by. In a small town in the Pacific Northwest, Pat has been raising Charlene (now played by newcomer Chase Infiniti) as a single parent under the assumed names of Bob and Willa Ferguson. Although Bob tries to keep his revolutionary spirit alive in vague ways (such as in his hilarious conference with Willa’s history teacher) but spends most of his time stoned on his couch watching The Battle of Algiers and being wildly overprotective of Willa, who is mostly unaware of her parents’ radical past and who just think that things like his ban on cell phones is him being weird.
What neither of them know is Bob’s past is about to come crashing in on him in the form of the return of Lockjaw, who has spent the years rising up through the corridors of power while still obsessing about the French 75 and Perfidia in particular. As it happens, he is being groomed for membership in the Christmas Adventurers Club, a secret society of rich and powerful white men who greet each other with “Hail Saint Nick!” However, the group’s background check is extensive and since Bob and Willa are loose ends that could endanger his admittance, he employs his military powers to track them down and grab them once and for all. When he and his troops storm Bob’s home, though, neither of them are there—Willa has been intercepted at a school dance by former French 75 colleague Deandra (Regina Hall) and spirited away to a safe rendezvous point while Bob, clad in his ratty bathrobe and with a head still full of pot, scurries out from the tunnel system beneath his house and out into streets that are currently in a state of revolt brought on by actions taken by Lockjaw as a way of covering up his true motives. Alas, Bob has so completely fried his brains on booze and drugs over the years that when he calls the old French 75 contact number to learn the rendezvous point, he cannot recall the key code phrase needed to receive the information. Back out on the increasingly chaotic streets, he takes shelter with Willa’s martial arts teacher, Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro), who is also doing his best to hide and move a number of immigrants who are currently being threatened by Lockjaw’s goons.
You might think that I have divulged an unreasonably large amount of the plot in the above paragraphs but I can assure you that there is a lot more to it—so much, in fact, that despite the sheer enormity of it all (if you have the chance to see it in 70MM, IMAX or, you few lucky devils, in the glory of VistaVision, take it), it is so overstuffed, even by the standards of cinematic maximalist Anderson, that it comes close to being overwhelming at time, especially considering the fact that it starts like a shot and maintains that momentum all the way through to the end. What is astonishing, though, is that Anderson has managed to create a screenplay that is taking giant creative swings at every turn without ever losing its emotional core. One of the recurring themes in Anderson’s work, right from the start, has been the notion of found families and the ways in which they come together (and sometimes fall apart) despite having no genetic connection to speak of. Here, Bob and Willa have formed a loving, if somewhat addled, family unit and when that unit is threatened by oppressive outside forces, it is the aging members of Bob’s earlier revolutionary family and younger people (almost exclusively Black and Mexican) who are willing to lend their voices to the struggle at great risk to themselves. As wild as the proceedings get, the family motif adds a strong emotional core that not only keeps things from completely flying off the tracks but allow you to keep giving a damn as you follow the film further down the rabbit hole.
Another fascinating aspect to Anderson’s screenplay is how it uncannily taps into the current zeitgeist, especially considering the fact that this marks the first time that he has made a film set in the present day since doing Punch-Drunk Love over two decades ago. One of the dangers of trying to make a movie capturing a particular moment in time as it is happening is that by the time the film is ready for release, it runs the risk of already feeling kind of dated. In approaching his tale of revolution, military authority, white supremacy, immigration and any number of other hot-button topics, Anderson has embraced an undeniably over-the-top approach that happens to mirror the times in oftentimes startling ways. (The day of the Chicago press screening happened to be the same day that Homeland Security and Border Patrol agents were hitting the streets—I even saw a couple of vans filled with them pass by on the streets after the film let out.) What makes this even more impressive is that he does it without resorting to the kind of references that might play well now but which might not exactly stand the test of time—no mentions of MAGA or BLM or the like are seen or heard at any point. By taking this approach, Anderson has made a film that is both timely and timeless and with a message about the undoing nature of revolution and the constant need for people to step up for what is right that will continue to resonate with viewers long after the current madness has come to an end.
Anderson being able to navigate the threads of a sprawling narrative is not a surprise, I suppose. What may come as a shock to even his most devoted fans is how adept he is at staging big action setpieces, an aspect of the filmmaking process that hasn’t really cropped up in his filmography so far. The long opening sequence chronicling the raid on the detention center is a masterpiece of action cinema that manages to juggle together tension, excitement, humor and character development in such a deft and offhand matter that it leaves you simply amazed at what he has pulled off. As the film progresses, he proves to have any number of equally thrilling and dramatically satisfying sequences—the aforementioned bank robbery scene, along with the follow up chase, is one that even Michael Mann might look upon with envy—building to an extended three-car pursuit through the hills of California that combines visceral thrills and hypnotic beauty into something that suggests, and I mean this as a compliment, what might have resulted if Michelangelo Antonioni were charge with directing Fury Road. I have seen many car chase sequences in my years as a moviegoer and while the vast majority of them tend to be little more than wastes of time, money and effort, this one ranks right up there with The French Connection, The Blues Brothers, Raiders of the Lost Ark and the various Mad Max films as one of the impressive ever filmed.
What might also come as a surprise to some, considering the weightiness of some of the subject matter, is how side-splittingly funny it all is. Sure, Anderson has always had elements of humor, usually of a dark nature, in his films but he has never allowed the wit to flow to the degree that it does here. Some of the humor is clearly inspired by Pynchon—particularly the stuff involving the Christmas Adventurers’ Club—and he does an excellent job of capturing the author’s sense of absurdist whimsy. At other times, he seems to be going for something closer to Dr. Strangelove in his mixing of horror and humor, particularly in regards to the Lockjaw character, who at one point has a confession scene that is almost a direct homage to a key scene from that earlier film. The scenes involving Bob and his increasingly frustrated calls to the French 75 in which he uses every tactic in the book to try to pry the needed information out from the person on the other end of the line despite not being able to supply the info that he need to ensure security are particularly impressive—between the writing, pacing and delivery, they come across like the greatest telephone routine that Bob Newhart never did and the punchline is especially amusing. What is especially impressive about all of this is the fact that despite the super-long running time, the film never loses steam in the way that a lot of comedies tend to do once they creep past the two-hour mark.
Of course, Anderson’s films have been justly celebrated for containing any number of brilliant performances—he has gotten career performances from everyone from Daniel Day-Lewis and Tom Cruise to Mark Wahlberg and Adam Sandler and has even drawn strong and convincing turns from such neophytes as Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim (who turns up here as one of the revolutionaries)—and One Battle After Another is no exception. Having previously turned down the lead role in Boogie Nights in order to work on a little thing called Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio has teamed up with Anderson for the first time here and delivers one of the most astonishing turns in a career that is not exactly hurting for such things. Certainly it is the funniest thing that he has ever done by a long shot—if there is a comedic bit to be had here that he does not nail completely, I cannot recall it (he even makes the sight of Bob crawling on the ground far more amusing than it needed to be). And yet, even though he is very funny in it, he finds the emotional center to his character—his absolute dedication to his daughter and his determination to pull himself together and find her, no matter what—so that as he continues on his spaced-out odyssey, there is a real grounding element to all the craziness. As Lockjaw, Sean Penn takes what could have just been a simplistic caricature of a military meathead and figures out a way to make him come across as both foolish and fearsome in equal measure while even showing a certain degree of empathy for the character in the process, the result being one of the most memorable performances that he has ever done.
Along the way, there are memorable supporting performances from the likes of Del Toro, Hall and Taylor (who is so fiercely charismatic in her scenes as Perfidia that the closest thing the film has to a stumble comes when she has to vanish from the proceedings) and bright moments to be had from the rest of the enormous cast, right down the the players who only have a line or two to deliver. (I especially liked the sight of legendary SNL writer James Downey as one of the members of the Christmas Adventurers’ Club.) However, the absolute knockout performance—the one that is likely to grab even those who deem the rest of the film to be too baffling to fully embrace—is from newcomer Chase Infiniti in her big-screen debut (she appeared last year on the TV adaptation of Presumed Innocent), who is absolutely mesmerizing every time she appears on screen. She brings a completely unique energy to the role of Willa that is a joy to witness and no matter what hurdle is thrown her way over the course of the film, she navigates it with a deftness that is almost startling to behold. Even more impressive is the way that she more than holds her own in scenes against the likes of Penn and DiCaprio—for most of the running time, she has only one extended scene with the latter but does such an effective job of sketching out the relationship between her and Bob in those few minutes that you completely buy his determination to retrieve her. In a film in which one form of craziness after another is around virtually every corner, Infiniti proves to be the strong solid center of it all and the fact that it should almost certainly prove to be the launch of a fascinating acting career is just one more feather in its cap.
More than just the best movie so far this year, One Battle After Another is the most vital one as well. It has a scope and ambition to it that dwarves pretty much everything else in recent memory—especially for a film costing as much as it does—and pays off all of its high-risk gambles with such practiced ease that it leaves you feeling alive and elated in a way that most moviegoers probably haven’t experienced first-hand since the arrival of Barbie a couple of years ago. Timely and timeless, hilarious and heartbreaking, thrilling and contemplative, epic and intimate, cynical and inspirational and never boring for a single second, this is the kind of movie that offers up enough thematic and narrative heft to potentially fuel decades of minute analysis while still being a crackerjack entertainment. When most films end these day (and often times well before that), I am more than eager to pack up my things and take off but the moment that this one came to an end (finding just the perfect needle drop along the way), I wanted to see it all again right then and there.