And the winner is… One Battle After Another

It’s unclear what American cinema aspires to any more, but many of its worthiest practitioners still feel stuck in the pleasurable tar pit of the 1970s. The greatest films from that hallowed era that still capture our derelict imaginations – Wanda (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), The Conversation (1974), The Parallax View (1974), Chinatown (1974) – trudge inexorably towards doom, reinterpreting the period’s big tent political themes, from Vietnam to Watergate to all manner of social disenfranchisement and marginalisation, as permeative, generalised malaise populated by neutered Davids outmatched by indifferent Goliaths.

Today, when we may feel even more acutely and totally fucked, our film language has become, fittingly, a kind of hyper-realisation of failure. Book-length theses have yet to cascade out from university presses, but we can identify a refracted, ‘We’ve been gamed’ rush circling so many of the defining films of the dumb Trump era, from desktop stares-into-the-void like Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021) to the American-dream-as-nightmare roller coaster Uncut Gems (2019) to the eternal recurrences of historical trauma in both the flesh-swallowing Nope (2022) and the anti-nostalgia wail of Armageddon Time (2022) to the rollicking despair of this year’s Eddington, a film so keyed into the now that it smartly pissed everyone off. All an ostensible ‘nail-biter’ like A House of Dynamite can do is show the same doomsday scenario three times. A 21st-century cinema of haplessness: bumbling and deluded, but also ignited by a concurrent feeling of – and desire for – self-immolation.

All of this serves as prologue to the refreshment of One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s not-really-Pynchon, not-quite-action-movie, which stormed the hearts and minds of 21st-century movie diehards who are sick and tired of the cinema of failure but cannot let go of the American 70s, a time of auteurist mythology defined by both the artistry of Altman and sell-out spectacle of Star Wars (1977). (Tellingly, Anderson embodies a bit of both worlds, the arthouse darling who has related the apocryphal tale that he dropped out of film school because a teacher denigrated Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991.) The admiring critical response has been justified but also conspicuous: here, finally, is something that dares to be satisfying while refusing to paint a rosy picture of where we’re at. Anderson’s film is as beaten to a pulp and scarified as Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw at the denouement and, like other recent Trump-era tales, it moves with a propulsive lurch, speeding and digressing, rising and falling. Yet One Battle is, somehow, not a movie of defeat, using the rough textures and no-fools mentality of that earlier, storied period of cinematic disillusionment as a surface-level primer to locate entirely new energies.

Taking its cues – but not character names or direct story points – from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, a death-of-the-revolution hangover fuelled by bemusement at Reagan-era conservatism, Anderson’s film looks around at the new, weird America with mouth comically agape. Decades of disenfranchisement, deregulation and deracination have brought us to this hellscape, equal parts neocon and new evangelical, a former society that feels almost totally shattered by a resurgent, bald-faced white supremacy and entirely owned by an unstoppable corporate sovereignty. Is there anything to be done besides giving it the middle finger?

The French 75, PTA’s gang of agitators, is a left-wing militia run largely by Black women, with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) at the helm, flanked by Deandra (Regina Hall), Junglepussy (Shayne McHayle), and a cadre of hangers-on, including Perfidia’s beau Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). The two make out sloppily after dangerous missions and holler to the California skies with brazen ‘fuck the Man’ freedom. “Of course I like Black girls. What the fuck do you think I’m here for?” Pat screams. Yet right from Perfidia and Pat’s first moments on screen, there seems to be an essential, maybe unbridgeable, difference between them. In the opening shot, we see Taylor sauntering with methodical confidence as she slips on a baseball cap and stealthily approaches the Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Center on the US-Mexico Border; a slow dissolve to DiCaprio shows something else – a desperate man, out of sorts, running. He’s always playing catch-up. His first line, fittingly: “I’m a little unclear to what the plan is.” Will he ever really know? Does he belong here? Does anyone?

Perfidia, however big her targets (abortion bans, immigrant prisoners or, more broadly, the fascist regime), fully embodies the desire for freedom in all forms. “She’s a runner, you’re a stump,” her mother later says; she “comes from a whole line of revolutionaries”. Perfidia’s loyalty wavers, but there are psychological as well as political reasons; after giving birth, it’s clear that post-partum depression, anxiety and fear all contribute to her decisions, which will include betraying her comrades. There’s also the teasing ambiguity of her sexual relationship with Lockjaw ever since their kinky meet-cute at Otay Mesa. “You died and went to pussy heaven, motherfucker,” she tells him while pointing a gun and forcing an erection. “Sweet thang,” he snarls, licking his lips. Without explicit dialogue to lay out Perfidia’s thoughts and motivations, Taylor, brilliant and brittle, grants us space to ascertain just how repulsed/fascinated she is by Lockjaw, a grotesque cartoon of white racist military power. Even if she disappears after 33 minutes, the mysteries of Perfidia’s needs and loyalties form the centre of the film, and Taylor performs with a tough-as-nails unsentimentality. As in her lead role in A.V. Rockwell’s extraordinary A Thousand and One (2023), Taylor bears the weight of an entire crushing social system, and she’s not going to lighten the load for the viewer with a wink or a smile.

Sixteen years – and a half-hour of breathless screen time – pass before the film settles into its main, Pynchon-cribbed plot, with Lockjaw in hot pursuit of Pat, now hiding out as ‘Bob Ferguson’, a perpetually high, paranoid and mobile phone-free burn-out living up north in a sanctuary city with teen daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Desperate for admission into the white supremacist Christmas Adventurers Club, a shady cabal of cream-cheese-coloured politicos, Lockjaw has returned for personal reasons: to verify or disclaim his possible paternity of Willa and so destroy evidence of ‘bad’ blood. Meanwhile, tangible, real-world heroics, divorced from platitudes, come in the form of Willa’s karate sensei Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who runs an underground railroad network for undocumented immigrants and will be key to helping Bob escape his tormentors and save the kidnapped Willa.

The characters’ relative, sometimes diffuse commitments to the cause – and the psychological havoc such commitments unleash upon the individual – keep the film’s wily and unsettled perspective on revolutionary activism at bay. Many a tweet-length op-ed has questioned its – and by extension, PTA’s – leftist bona fides, but the potential for a Hollywood movie to be provocatively progressive is and has always been thin as a wire. Let’s not forget that 2023’s Barbie, a Mattel movie, was seen by a number of its fans as not only savvy but subversive, and by others as a feature-length toy advert. However one chooses to measure One Battle’s dedication to its characters’ political allegiances, Anderson’s astonishing craft surely coasts on the buzz of rebellion. OK, we’re far from the territory of, say, Ben Russell’s documentary Direct Action (2024), in which the efficacy of political change stems from the deliberate, durationally captured work of an anti-corporate collective. But in his own way, Anderson has also always made movies that expand or compress time. Think not only of the often cited 16-year jump off the porch in There Will Be Blood (2007) but also of the way that the entirety of Magnolia (1999) seems to exist at once, a deluge of emotions and longing that keeps interrupting itself, speeding and slowing and stretching in musical movements that are somehow both nauseating and impeccable.

One Battle crashes over the viewer like a series of waves, and Anderson zips with unflagging gusto from one set piece – and one type of film – to the next. Mission procedural, heist gone wrong, romantic melodrama, satirical comedy, chase thriller – all threaded with an ambition and ease that could make any filmmaker envious. His staging of kinetic action in individual scenes is as eclectic as his superstructure: the camera racing after an out-of-control minivan post-heist in downtown LA; a helicopter shot of Perfidia booking it on foot, barely outpacing a barrage of cop cars; long lenses transforming a car chase in the rolling California hills into a game of hide-and-seek in which the precipitous roads themselves become towers that obscure and reveal at gut-churning intervals.

Anderson’s film moves so fleetly, covering so much ground, physical and otherwise, that it’s bound to please and frustrate in equal measure. Is it a genuine rebel yell, or does it borrow political sloganeering to package a Warner Bros-financed uber-spectacle? Does its preoccupation with its white men’s valorisation and fetishisation of Black women largely go unexamined, or is this the personal expression of a filmmaker engaging with his own mixed heritage family? Is its final message of seeming optimism too starry-eyed, or are we as fucked as Bob probably will be once he finally joins the consumer culture and becomes a mobile phone addict? It can be all these things, of course. But perhaps One Battle makes the most sense as a riveting companion piece and counterpoint to Anderson’s earlier Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice (2014): as in that film, its characters – and us – are ultimately helpless against the forces of the establishment. But this is an adventure, not a satire. Only here, only now, just for a moment, the evils of conservative culture can be vanquished with a little gumption and a tank of gas.