I studiously avoided seeing or hearing anything related to One Battle After Another before seeing it for myself. I didn’t watch trailers or ads. I didn’t read a plot summary. I steered clear of reviews — even on Letterboxd. I covered my ears while a couple of audience members near me discussed the film at a completely unrelated screening at the New York Film Festival. So I successfully entered the IMAX theater not knowing what the film was about, wishing for it to wash over me in the purest, most organic way possible. And yet. After seeing the MetaCritic score (95 out of 100) and glancing past a number of five-star Letterboxd ratings, the genie was already out of the bottle. I didn’t have to read anything to absorb the consensus: this is supposed to be a masterpiece. So there was no way to go in completely fresh. That thought was wrapped around my mind for every frame. Over-hyped? Yes, alas.
That’s not to say I disliked the movie. It might actually be easier if I disliked the movie. I could burst that bubble right quick. It’s quite another thing to like a movie but feel like I don’t like it quite enough, to be enthusiastic, but not rapturous. It’s not the bursting of a bubble, more like the slow deflation of a balloon. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson thoroughly impresses, but reporting anything short of me levitating out of the theater feels like damning with faint praise.
Pardon my indulgence. Third paragraph and I haven’t gotten to the movie yet. But I’m trying to take a more personal approach to media in this newsletter, to report my experiences from my unique vantage point rather than presume to render a verdict. I graduated college with a minor in film studies, but I don’t think I have quite the breadth of scholarship to call myself a critic, per se. These are more personal essays about movies and TV shows I saw. What’s more, I think it’s important to report the context within which I saw this film because it’s hard to separate my feelings from the external noise surrounding it. Always happens with some movies during the awards season onslaught. It is what it is.
So let’s talk One Battle After Another. It was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland but not directly adapted from it. Unread by me, that novel, based on my extensive research of opening its Wikipedia page just now, explored the rebellious counterculture of the 1960s and the repression that followed under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In this story, the rebels are freedom fighters from a group called the French 75, who liberate migrants from detention facilities and attack politicians’ offices, banks, and the power grid. One of those rebels is Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), an explosives expert who becomes romantically involved with hotheaded fellow rebel Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), who talks a good game about the movement but lacks discipline and restraint.
Yada yada yada — I don’t want to give away too much of the plot — a child is born and we flash forward 16 years to Pat, who is now living in hiding as Bob and raising their teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) by himself. I wondered about the film’s time frame, which isn’t explicitly specified. Were the earlier events set in the present and the later events set 16 years in our future? Or were the earlier events set 16 years in the past? I suppose it doesn’t matter too much. No presidents are referenced, real or fictional, but 16 years ago Barack Obama was busy earning the nickname “deporter-in-chief.” Tragically, the inhumane treatment of migrants in the US is an evergreen subject.
Unfortunately, Bob has descended into drug and alcohol abuse and his relationship with his daughter is strained at best. This will be a problem later when Bob and Willa are separated by the plot and we’re supposed to root for them to be reunited. This latter section of the film has kind of a Bob problem in general. The film adopts more of a comic tone than I’d anticipated, and much of that is achieved by turning him from a competent bomb-maker into kind of a buffoon who forgets crucial code words and phrases, needs to be rescued, and wanders in search of his daughter. The competency dial is set too low for a character who used to be in the know, especially after the film has established how paranoid and protective he has been of his daughter. So I found myself fully invested in Willa’s plight, but less so in him as a rescuer.
Nevertheless, Anderson achieves some invigorating sequences, including one in which a seemingly mild-mannered martial arts instructor (Benicio Del Toro) must lead migrants to safety when their building is raided by military forces. There is also a great car pursuit scene that takes advantage of the rolling hills on a long desert road. And throughout the film, Jonny Greenwood’s musical score propels the action forward in thrilling fashion.
Sean Penn chews plenty of scenery as the film’s primary villain, Pete Hegseth — er, Steven Lockjaw, a caricature of military machismo. Okay, no, I don’t think the character is intended to represent Hegseth, per se, since One Battle was shot before Hegseth was appointed as Secretary of WAR. But Anderson mercilessly skewers the same kind of vain, insecure masculinity that Hegseth embodied during his embarrassing address to military leaders on September 30. At one point another character clocks Lockjaw’s overly tight muscle tee and the lifts in his shoes.
The larger villains of the piece are fascism and white supremacy in general, and it’s eerie how effectively Anderson captures this moment in US history, from the migrant concentration camps to the militarization of police, or the straight-up military invasion of US cities; perhaps by design, it’s difficult to tell police apart from military in this film — art imitating life. I’m not sure how I feel, though, about a white nationalist organization portrayed in the film called the Christmas Adventurers Club, whose members come off as silly rather than threatening. That’s surely Anderson’s intent, to make fun of these cretinous racists, but I think Spike Lee achieved a better balance when he portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as rank idiots in BlacKkKlansman; they were no less frightening because they were shown through the eyes of a Jewish character and a Black character whom the Klan members were direct threats to.
So that’s One Battle After Another, an excellent film that didn’t hit me like the masterpiece it has been declared to be. That said, it is my favorite Anderson film since 2007’s There Will Be Blood. In-between then and now I have liked both The Master and Phantom Thread with some reservations, and I outright disliked Inherent Vice and Licorice Pizza. I still haven’t adored an Anderson film the way I did his hat trick of Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love. Perhaps an Anderson retrospective is in order for me sometime in the not-too-distant future. One film after another.
I am glad you're writing reviews.. not sure if that was something you did a lot pre-Gold Derby but I know that working there probably didn't give you a chance to flex that muscle.
The overhype was almost impossible to avoid and I'm glad I saw it while most of our colleagues were at TIFF. I see no reason to see it more than twice. The screenplay and Sean Penn are the standouts.