Revolutionaries come in all different shapes, sizes, and attitudes. The revolutionaries in One Battle After Another prove just that. Before he became a drug and alcohol abuser reduced to a disheveled get-up that consists of a logger-plaid robe and cover-up sunglasses, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), at one point in time, helped helm the radical faction known as the French 75. He blew shit up. He fought for freedom—namely, releasing individuals and families from immigration detention centers —with the full and unrelenting direction of his partner in crime, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Their hot-for-each-other energy of propulsive power culminated in having a child, Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti, who will soon rule Hollywood), during their years of rebellion.
Eventually, the law catches up to the French 75. The actions of a very visceral revolution were not without their ramifications, causing Perfidia to abandon Bob, then known by the group as “Ghetto Pat,” and Willa. She enters a witness protection program after being blackmailed by Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (a Best Supporting Actor win deserving Sean Penn), whom she had previously engaged in an under-the-radar sexual encounter with.
Fast forward 16 years, and Willa is attending high school in the Southern California town of Baktan Cross, where a few members of the French 75 have settled, including Bob, who is constantly paranoid that someday Lockjaw will bust down the door to his cabin in the woods. Lo and behold, Lockjaw, along with his ICE-type goon squad, descends upon the sanctuary city, forcing Willa to be scooped up and sent to safety, while Bob embarks upon a hectic journey to find her.
Similar to revolutionaries, revolutions themselves appear in all different shapes and sizes and attitudes, yet the one aspect they all share in common is time. Paul Thomas Anderson has spent the majority, if not the entirety, of his nearly 30-year directorial career positing the epiphany of how time ultimately shapes everything we do and everything we become.
In Boogie Nights (1997), he approaches the perception with a blunt attitude and visuals —William H. Macy’s Little Bill can’t see himself in the next decade and aptly times his death to that of the drop of the New Year’s Ball. In There Will Be Blood (2007), oil baron Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) conquers an ever-changing landscape of American capitalism with force, only to become a dried-up version of the man he once was. The Master predicates its entire being on committing itself to the idea of what someone is for “a billion years.” I could keep going, but you get the picture.
One Battle After Another is no different, allowing PTA to communicate this theme he knows perhaps better than any working director in both an old-fashioned “I know what the hell I’m doing here” way, conjoined at the hip with a completely new-age take, surrounded by big-budget gunfights, desert car chases, and piercing political commentary. The film remains fundamentally PTA; a world of characters—this time around, being a significant improvement in both female and Black leads—that feel so tangible, that have been created, given life, and given purpose. Characters that feel so authentic. So Paul Thomas Anderson.
To that effect, One Battle After Another, with its less-than-modest (read: biggest PTA amount ever) budget of $130 million, along with being shot on VistaVision and DiCaprio & Co. putting out a consistent stream of engaging marketing materials, positions itself as one of the most accessible films within the PTA catalogue. It doesn’t possess the whimsy of Magnolia (1999) or the deep, personal provocation of Phantom Thread (2017), instead opting to let DiCaprio deliver an elevated Wolf of Wall Street-esque performance, continually presenting PTA’s humor, which often reveals itself upon rewatches of his films, at its most accessible.
The interchange between Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro)—a direct counterbalance to Bob’s manic presence and a character, in classic PTA fashion, that completely takes over the movie when he appears—and Bob spawns one of the funniest bits in a movie this year. As does the xenophobic Lockjaw’s obsession with gaining entry to the exclusive Christmas Adventurers Club, a league of white men that promises national cleansing while chanting “Hail Saint Nick.”
Pulling off One Battle After Another’s wisecracking wit brings much-needed levity to an epic like this, and PTA pulls off the technical side of film with a master’s touch. Rolling hills turn into crashing ocean waves, and monastery cloisters evolve into sterile information compounds, all presenting something other than what first meets the eye. It’d be a bit of a shock to get to the 98th Academy Awards on March 15 and not see the eleven-time nominated PTA get on stage to accept the golden statue for Best Directing.
The fluidity of the story, of the place, is unlike anything Anderson has put together before, even though DP Michael Bauman also shot Licorice Pizza in 2021. This film is different. In the same way that Adam Sandler’s Barry from Punch-Drunk Love (2002) possesses a love in his life that makes him “stronger than you can imagine,” so does One Battle After Another in its love for life. It’s love for energy. Love for cinema.
Coming in at 162 minutes, One Battle After Another certainly doesn’t feel like a near three-hour film. The opening set piece alone catapults the vitality of the project to resemble something you’d see and feel with ten minutes left in a movie. Frequent collaborator on prior films such as Inherent Vice (2014) and Phantom Thread, composer Jonny Greenwood forges a relentless score that marks itself as instantly significant within his own oeuvre.
Early in the film, a voice says, “Sixteen years passed. The world had changed very little.” We hard cut from baby Willa to her as a teenager (There Will Be Blood references are everywhere for those with eyes to see them). Here, Anderson illustrates a moral core that encompasses the biggest of ideas with the simplest of sentences. Bob, after raising his daughter by himself for over a decade and a half and now engaging in an offensive he has waited so long to enlist in, is failing.
As PTA so often likes to do in his films, the relationship between father and child is a navigating force, melding the aforementioned idea of how time changes us with trying to get that time back by any means necessary. Governmental military overreach and a crackdown on “haters” are still happening in the world around Bob, but Bob’s world has evolved, changed, and crumbled. The man he once was, fighting assiduously day and night, is no longer. “Ghetto Pat” is gone. The man he is now, attempting to parent assiduously day and night, is only a vision of a future he sees, not a reality.
But that vision of the future is just as important as the vision of the here and now that Anderson tackles so tactfully on screen. A future that, much in the same vein as Magnolia, believes in the sincere hope of children usurping the choices of their parents out of their own self-actualization. This, combined with one of the many other aspects and themes previously mentioned, mixes to produce something undeniably delicious.
One Battle After Another, if you couldn’t gather already from the litany of references to prior pictures, acts as a culmination of Anderson’s career in nearly every single way. And he delivers a masterpiece in doing so.
Review Courtesy of Ethan Simmie
Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros. Pictures
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