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Viva la revolución! As bellowed by the ex-radical and current schlub Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), we have One Battle After Another’s most immediately memorable line, and arguably its thesis statement. But in this compelling, propulsive new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, it’s still worth scrutinizing the nuances, undertows, and implications of that command. With the Spanish maintained, and the line’s ties to the Cuban Revolution, it embodies the film’s debt to the western United States’ hispanic culture. But whose revolución are we actually talking about, and is the ailing Bob sincere or endearingly delusional?
A primary clue is that One Battle After Another takes place not only in a cinematically heightened world, but an alternate one. Despite its roots in the author’s 1990 novel Vineland, it’s not a fully Pynchonian space, which Anderson’s adaptation of Inherent Vice evokes better. The opening sequence provides our bearings and some early dramatic coordinates: the French 75, a well-drilled, left-wing militant group, plans to audaciously liberate undocumented migrants from a border-detention facility; among them are DiCaprio under his former alias “Ghetto Pat,” the dynamic and silver-tongued Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and their ringleader Deandra (Regina Hall). Col Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn)––damn, these names are fun to type––lies in wait, his military defense actions very originally juxtaposed by Anderson with the hulking boner in his pants.
Political urgency, contemporary culture-war talking points, and unashamedly aroused espionage personnel: this is what Anderson is committed to in One Battle After Another, and on my very provisional first-viewing verdict, he’s made a largely thrilling populist action movie with some of his most spectacular cinematic formalism, and disciplined, linear storytelling, but lacking the dark beauty and profundity of his best work. The characters we’re encouraged to root for are suitably inspiring and galvanizing; the baddies are rotten white-supremacist thugs (in executive-boardroom attire, along with camo gear); the moral boundaries are sometimes as clear as Star Wars, whose mythos and focus on dynastic legacies seem quite carefully adapted by Anderson (down to the martial arts references). Yet what makes it deliver and communicate so well as a rousing (hopefully appealing) commercial play is nailing these narrative essentials, and getting those storytelling pistons moving, and the cars on the loop-de-loop desert highways.
Following their near-“meet-cute” at the French 75’s first-depicted mission, Perfidia and Lockjaw begin a surprising romantic entanglement, the former politically disgusted but sexually intrigued, although with a likely motive to infiltrate his operation as a double agent. As Pat is her primary squeeze, Perfidia’s ensuing pregnancy leaves the father unconfirmed, and her arrest by the authorities––although she fortunately escapes––forces the French 75 to quickly enter hiding under new aliases.
So Pat becomes the suitably bathetic-sounding Bob, the single father and guardian of Perfidia’s daughter Willa, played by newcomer Chase Infiniti in the film’s main timeline, which seemingly takes place in the present day. Lockjaw re-emerges after he’s tipped to the French 75’s whereabouts––his primary, personal motivation to entrap Willa, which may hopefully ensnare Perfidia from her own closely guarded whereabouts.
On the offensive in the film’s opening chapter with their Weather Underground-like tactics and calls for a utopian transformation of society, the group now merely want to survive, or if not that, go out with dignity––even through martyrdom, consecrating them as future inspirations. Seen alongside their downbeat present existence, the modern United States’ slide into fascism (depicted in the film, principally, through Operation Safeguard-type raids) damns their idealistic past struggles as irrelevant, visualized well as their ally Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro) escorts the disoriented Bob to safety, his guerrilla combatant past lost deep in the stoned detritus of his brain. This steadicam-driven sequence––one of the film’s most suspenseful––is played out against the backdrop of the migrants he’s sheltering also fleeing from ICE. With this imagery so charged and so symbolic of Trump’s petrifying second term, Anderson linking it to the plight of the French 75 risks seeming arbitrary, one piece of illogic too many.
As the film reaches its denouement, its most endearing feature becomes a reflection on parental ties, whether in found or biological families. Willa represents the latest generation, their lives defined by clearer political principles and revised thinking on sex and gender, soundtracked by the trap of Shek Wes’s “Mo Bamba” instead of Bob’s beloved Steely Dan. And the French 75, the melting pot of New Left idealism that was his life’s work and passion, is spiritually “dead”––probably before it was forced to physically perish––once Lockjaw re-identifies them. This is poignant, and One Battle After Another excels even further than its vehicular action acrobatics once it burrows down to this essential fact.
One Battle After Another opens in theaters on Friday, September 26.
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