ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
The revolution might not be televised, to paraphrase a ’70s song, but it rages on in One Battle After Another, a kinetic and often darkly comedic film about political stances and personal consequences.
Gil Scott-Heron’s famous Black Liberation song is just one of the threads in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s tapestry about a group of radicals, the authorities after them, and a young woman caught in the middle.
Adapting Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 postmodern novel Vineland, Anderson (Licorice Pizza) updates the book’s ex-hippies and federal agents into a revolutionary group targeting immigration camps and the hardliners hunting them. Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn give wonderfully layered, physical and emotional performances here as figures on opposite sides of that equation, connected from the opening moments.
DiCaprio (Killers of the Flower Moon) plays Ghetto Pat, an explosives expert as hot for partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, Straw) as he is for fuses and mortars. Perfidia loves him too, but she also loves power, and as their group, French 75, springs detainees from one camp, she can’t resist holding its boss, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Penn, Daddio), at gunpoint. She swipes his hat and forces him to hold his erection high, triggering an obsession in the process.
Like its radical couple and their found family (shades of Anderson’s Boogie Nights), One Battle After Another seldom sits still, covering a lot of ground over its propulsive two hours and 41 minutes. Within the first act alone, as French 75 continues its efforts and Perfidia toys with Lockjaw on the side, she and Pat have a baby girl. This grounds the bomber more than his sweetheart. She’s a runner; you’re a stone,” tsks Perfidia’s disapproving mother, just before Perfidia’s part in a bank heist sends Pat and the baby into hiding.
Cut to sixteen years later, where Pat now goes by Bob and his daughter (Chase Infiniti, TV’s Presumed Innocent) is Willa, a bright student whose success in school brings tears to his drug-addled eyes. The spirited teen, who calls her dad by his first name and blasts him for driving drunk, has few illusions about her parents’ past but doesn’t quite realize the danger still out there until Lockjaw and his ilk resurface.
Lockjaw has been invited to join a secret White Power society called the Christmas Adventurers Club that would be laughable if its beliefs didn’t sound like the garbage some people now feel comfortable saying aloud. Tortured over his attraction to a Black woman, he’s determined to use his immigration and drug enforcement to crack down on Perfidia’s remaining colleagues.
Meanwhile, French 75 members like Deandra (Regina Hall, O’Dessa) snatch Willa to keep her safe, leading Bob on his own odyssey to find her with the help of Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro, The Phoenician Scheme), a martial arts sensei running a “Latino Harriet Tubman” operation in their sanctuary city home.
The politics couldn’t be timelier. Lockjaw and cohorts ignoring children in cages as they play ball with thin aluminum “blankets” hits hard, as does the callousness of their questioning. Images of a pregnant Perfidia and later Willa shooting automatic weapons also are striking, yet I wouldn’t say the film glamorizes violence. Rather, similar to There Will Be Blood, One Battle After Another shows complex people dealing with the fallout of their choices and ambitions.
Penn makes for an intimidating adversary, someone who walks in lockstep even in a convenience store, a rigid man who uses a battering ram to bring a woman flowers and dispenses racial slurs like condiments. As Sergio, Del Toro exudes calm leadership, competence, and effortless cool, urging Bob to keep his wits about him while simultaneously organizing his own protective operation. Taylor and Hall are likewise strong. For Taylor, Perfidia is a fiery woman with her own identity crisis while Hall’s emotive eyes show regret and resignation for a friend she wishes could do better and the mess she has to handle in her wake.
But the heart of the film belongs to DiCaprio and Infiniti. In her first feature role, Infiniti shows Willa’s roil of emotions: self-reliance, anger, wishing she wasn’t caught up in her parents’ past. Her sass at those around her hides her trauma and fear, tapping into scrappy survival.
DiCaprio, meanwhile, is at times shamblingly funny and oddly sympathetic as Bob segues from blindsided when first on the run to an unrepentant stoner trying hard to show paternal authority. Caught off-guard from Lockjaw’s troops, he spends a chunk of the film wearing a plaid bathrobe over his clothes, scrambling to charge his phone on the go and keep up with those who haven’t lost a step. There’s a marvelous sequence where the jittery dad can’t remember coded passwords and sputters profanities at the true believer who tells him he should’ve memorized his texts better, frantic to protect the only cause that matters—his daughter.
Between the crackling dialogue, Anderson, cinematographer Michael Bauman, and editor Andy Jurgensen ramp up the suspense through Steadicam shots that travel through Sergio’s haunts and Bob scurrying to find a disguise interspersed with long takes and closeups, some with characters face-to-face. Wide-shot chases through desolate California hills in the last act are as riveting as they are startling.
There’s always something cresting behind these characters or coming down the pike, and their challenge is deciding whether to stop and face it or keep on running.
