ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is Paul Thomas Anderson’s first contemporary film in nearly a quarter of a century. Combining a story embedded in modern America and Western political structures with his proven filmmaking ability has been a long time coming, but the result is a picture that is gripping and entertaining, taking sides in the battle for history without losing its capacity for doubt.
The film opens by establishing the activist group ‘The French 75’, with Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyona Taylor) amongst those liberating migrants from a detention processing centre. While doing so, she sexually humiliates Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), kicking off a destructive obsession in him. That toxic fascination also threatens Perfidia’s partner, ‘Ghetto’ Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) – The French 75’s explosives expert – and young daughter, Charlene, even as the latter two relocate into hiding under the names Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti) and Bob.
One of the most refreshing thematic aspects of ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is a willingness to allow for ambiguities and avoid simple answers and portrayals. A lot of mainstream cinema of the ‘post-truth era’ has either hedged its bets by avoiding partisan positioning in banal and frustrating ways or adopted leftist positions of patronising simplicity or smug caricature. This equivocating approach refuses or fails to challenge the systemic issues of the power structures it depicts, instead channelling its criticism via individual bigots or idiots. This half-measure has been exemplified by overtly topical films like CIVIL WAR or DON’T LOOK UP, but also genre fare like CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD or, to a lesser extent, MICKEY 17. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER attacks and ridicules the patriarchal white supremacy that permeates American power, but doesn’t present all of the film’s protagonists as flawless heroes.
The primary vector for these nuances is Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob, who becomes the focus of many of the film’s askew glances at self-proclaimed revolutionaries. While Lockjaw’s sexual fascination with Perfidia is the primary driver of the perils Bob and Willa later face, Perfidia’s hyper-sexual initial relationship with Pat/Bob is cut from the same cloth. When Lockjaw accosts Pat and asks if he “likes Black girls”, before grotesquely expressing his fetishised intrigue, it’s like looking into a smashed mirror. Lockjaw is the perverted face of the power dynamics Pat himself inhabits, criticising Perfidia for supposedly neglecting Pat and Charlene in favour of continuing her revolutionary battles with The French 75, and ultimately her absconding from her oppressor-approved witness protection ‘safety’.
“…the image of Lockjaw’s subordinates raiding a high school dance and putting an uncooperative non-binary teenager in handcuffs without charge is an unnerving echo of present political rhetoric.”
Taylor’s Perfidia is a complex character, portraying explosive and uncompromising agency, while still succumbing to a pyrrhic victory for the oppressive state within her brief runtime. Regina Hall’s slightly truncated but compelling role as Deandra offers a different model in the film’s latter two acts, conveying experience and a determination that is nevertheless still laced with fear. Meanwhile, the beleaguered Pat, whose white male identity affords him a complacency Perfidia never had, can retreat into Bob, an impotent figure getting high whilst watching THE BATTLE OF ALGIERS. Contrasting his erratic and diminished revolutionary spirit against the calm and active, yet relaxed and oddly carefree Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro), Willa’s karate teacher and organiser of an underground railroad, is one of the film’s pleasures.
Penn delivers the flashiest performance in Lockjaw: a manspreading nightmare of perverted, bigoted malevolence. The creative team has distilled the worst of American militarism and exceptionalism into one single loathsome avatar. However, there are other expressions of what he represents, which are either more subtle or more obviously comedic. The white supremacist group of which he seeks membership is the absurdly named Christmas Adventurers Club (“Hail Saint Nick!”), with the gentility and formality played for Coen-like laughs. More disturbingly, the image of Lockjaw’s subordinates raiding a high school dance and putting an uncooperative non-binary teenager in handcuffs without charge is an unnerving echo of present political rhetoric.
Even if all of these ideas are floating around in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, the film goes beyond commentary and is also an accomplished technical achievement. Jonny Greenwood’s musical score is another magnificent collaboration with Anderson, producing a sort of paranoiac percussive jazz that is as unrelenting as Lockjaw. Michael Bauman’s photography on 35mm VistaVision has a similar depth and richness to Lol Crawley’s on the same format in THE BRUTALIST, albeit filtered through the dusty Californian interior rather than Pennsylvania’s decay and greenery.
“Jonny Greenwood’s musical score is another magnificent collaboration with Anderson, producing a sort of paranoiac percussive jazz that is as unrelenting as Lockjaw. Michael Bauman’s photography on 35mm VistaVision has a similar depth and richness to Lol Crawley’s on the same format in THE BRUTALIST…”
However, above all else, Anderson’s staging of key sequences and pacing of the film command attention. An initial car chase shares similarities with the seminal car chase example from THE FRENCH CONNECTION, but it’s a climactic one utilising the rolling blind summits of a Californian desert highway that feels propulsive and tense in a way quintessential to this specific film. The film’s combination of excellent technical execution and complex portrayal of activism in the face of state response is not unique – Daniel Goldhaber’s 2022 film, HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE, is similarly propulsive – but rarely expressed at this scale of filmmaking.
That ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER arrives at a time of military deployments in US cities, increasing xenophobia, and unprecedented domestic use of state power may feel apt. Given that the film was shot entirely during the Biden administration, before Trump’s return to office, it’s tempting to label it prophetic. To do so would overlook a key element running through the film: the circularity and persistence of the dynamics that drive the plot.
Anderson’s script is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, set at the peak of the Reagan administration. The near-seamless transposing of those ideas into a similar web of characters and themes forty years later belies the idea that the catalysts have calcified into the bedrock of society.
The only reason Bob has to wail “viva la revolución” is that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The act of revolution is rarely an explosive bang, but rather an act of constant renewal and evolution, adapting to win the war, one battle after another.