Leonardo DiCaprio vapes, drinks, and detonates his way through PTA’s chaotic—and often hilarious—vision of America’s cracked revolutionary spirit.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
America is broken at the movies. After the under-appreciated “Beau Is Afraid” (2023) and this year’s “Eddington,” both from auteur Ari Aster and both visionary dystopian works starring Academy Award-winner Joaquin Phoenix, we now get the admittedly badly-titled “One Battle After Another” from Paul Thomas Anderson (“There Will Be Blood”) with Academy Award-winner Leonardo DiCaprio as a California, bomb-making revolutionary named Bob Ferguson.
In what appears to be the present time, Bob and a band of resistance fighters named the French 75 (vive la revolution), including the beautiful firebrand Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), capture a group of soldiers at one of their detention centers and also capture their frighteningly and comically leathery leader, Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Academy Award-winner Sean Penn).
The meeting of Perfidia, who is Bob’s wife, and Lockjaw ignites dangerous sexual fireworks. Lockjaw, who is later invited to become a member of an elite group of notably racist fascists, will embark upon a quest to track down Perfidia and capture her. Also in the mix is a sensei/revolutionary named Sergio St. Carlos (a magnificent Benicio Del Toro), who is Bob’s mentor and best friend.
In addition to the Shirelles’ 1962 standard “Soldier Boy,” we hear at first the mournful tones of the score by Anderson regular Jonny Greenwood (“Phantom Thread”), whose sad horns will be replaced by a nervous piano. “One Battle After Another” not only evokes Gillo Pontecorvo’s “The Battle of Algiers,” the 1966 depiction of the Algerian rebellion against French colonialists, but it also shows us images from the film. The kinetic, often hand-held lensing of cinematographer Michael Bauman, using vintage VistaVision cameras (like “The Brutalist”), often recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” (2006).
In addition to being a dystopian action thriller, complete with car chases and shootouts, “One Battle After Another” is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s groundbreaking 1990 novel “Vineland,” which is credited as a source. Like the novel, Anderson’s film is also a paternity story. Who is the father of 16-year-old Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti)? Is it Bob, who believes she is his daughter and has raised her on his own since Perfidia was captured and disappeared? Or is it Captain Lockjaw, who, if it’s true that he fathered a mixed-race daughter, may find himself the next target of the racist Christmas Adventurers Club?
The tone of the film is squirrelly. At one moment, a captured revolutionary (Paul Grimstad) is threatened, not with torture, but with the torture of his sister. At the next, DiCaprio delivers a tour de force performance as the goatee and man-bun-sporting, drunken, vape-sucking, buffoonish bomber, who is above anything else, completely paranoid. Sixteen years after the opening scenes, Bob lives with Willa in a small house in the deep woods in Humboldt County. But Lockjaw, now a colonel, tracks Bob down, and in action scenes full of thrills similar to those in the aforementioned “Children of Men,” Bob manages to escape. He flees to the dojo of St. Carlos, who turns out to be a Robin Hood of revolutionaries.
In addition to Del Toro, “One Battle After Another” is replete with star turns. DiCaprio shines as the clownish and horny good guy, who needs to be high to stay calm. Taylor (“The Book of Clarence”) is incandescent as Perfidia, the femme fatale of this semi-comical, dystopian noir. As Willa’s unofficial stepmother, Deandra, award-winner Regina Hall is a maternal font of love. The camera loves newcomer Infiniti. As an even wackier variation of R. Lee Ermey in “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), Penn is a hoot. Tony Goldwyn is a marvelously loathsome Christmas Adventurer. Shayna McHale takes charge as a resistance bank robber named Junglepussy (Is this a Bond movie?). At times, “One Battle After Another” suggests a spaghetti Western/“Mad Max” mix, with muscle cars replacing horses. Willa is sent to hide with the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, nuns who grow weed at a convent in the woods. The film is Anderson’s second go at a work by novelist Pynchon, after the sorely underrated “Inherent Vice” (2014), another California-set examination of the insane, sex-crazed psyche of America with Phoenix as a private detective caught up in a conspiracy. In several scenes, Bob is called upon to recall passwords that have sailed away into the boozy, weedy mists of Bob-time. Is Anderson this generation’s Stanley Kubrick? Yes, and the revolution will not be televised. See this vision in a theater.
‘One Battle After Another’
Rating: R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content, and drug use
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Anderson
Running Time: 2 hours, 41 minutes
Where to Watch: In theaters
Grade: A
Boston Movie News 