After a couple of September soft launches, awards season officially opens with Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, which qualifies as multiple films simultaneously. This is at once an auteurist statement of some description (pushing three hours, so that we might feel the weight of it), a star-driven action movie (which is why Warner Bros. have shelled out so for it), a literary adaptation (riffing on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland) and a vision of an America split down the middle, revolutionary Left on one side, authoritarian Right on the other. To call it timely would be the understatement of the year; there are stretches where you could convince yourself you were watching one of those live events that are now beamed into cinemas, only here the live event is 2025 itself. What's extraordinary is that the film remains as spry and as light on its feet as it does; it illustrates how far and how fast a movie can go when it doesn't have to slow down or stop every twenty minutes to have someone explain the plot. Anderson trusts his audience to intuit what's really going on, and allows us to pick things up on the run. In doing so, he puts us in more or less the same position as his main characters: members of an antifa collective introduced cranking up their campaign against an oppressive administration by liberating a migrant detention centre in the Cali desert overseen by close-cropped martinet Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). When a later mission goes awry, however, the group - headed by angular Black firebrand Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and her explosives-expert squeeze Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) - are forced to go underground, pursued at every turn by the humiliated, dogged Lockjaw. The first sixteen years of this narrative are covered in a thirty-minute prologue; its conclusion, laid out over the following two-plus hours, all but breaks the movie land-speed record. Best buckle up.
It's not long before the stakes begin to spike wildly. Lockjaw has a hard-on for Perfidia, blurring the political and personal. Bob and Perfidia raise a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), so they're fighting for her future - even if this teenager presents as some way more grounded and responsible than her goofball pop, a dope-smoking paranoiac spiralling into bewildered middle age. It wouldn't surprise me if some viewers, new to this director's oeuvre, are discombobulated by the idiosyncratic way Anderson gets us into and out of certain scenes and sequences. Lockjaw shows up at Perfidia's front door, first with flowers, then - minutes later, after there's been no response - with a handheld battering ram. (How quickly love and lust can turn to hate.) Often, the narrative line will veer miles away from the leads to explore this plot's backchannels - its Deep State, as it were. Lockjaw finds himself courted by Republican grandees, and targeted by representatives of a KKK-like white supremacist organisation, headed by a craggy David Duke lookalike, who operate out of a rabbit warren of offices and corridors built under a nondescript suburban home. To quell potential unrest, the military are sent into a high-school prom, which actually doesn't seem that wild a swing given some of the images coming out of America Now. (You fearfully envision a real-world headline: Actor Who Played 'One Battle After Another' Migrant Snatched By ICE.) Unlike Ari Aster, busy both-sidesing in his recent, pipsqueak Eddington, Anderson acknowledges this is plainly asymmetrical warfare: the unsmiling, State-sanctioned, heavily armed Lockjaw against a ragtag of kooks, weirdos, dropouts and flakes who urgently need to get their shit together if they are to stand a fighting chance. (Fans of Anderson's fetish-worthy phonecalls - think Philip Seymour Hoffman in Magnolia or Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love - should be delighted by Bob's haphazard efforts to recall his former passwords and rendezvous points.)
I say urgently, because a) the murderous Lockjaw isn't messing around here, and b) the film proceeds in one of those Andersonian fugue states, in permanent, perpetual, sometimes even perplexing motion. Jonny Greenwood's antic, antsy score is often the only reassurance that some outside presence is steering and shaping a multiplex film that would otherwise appear to be moving in highly mysterious ways. (When the film kids of TikTok say nobody right now is doing it like Paul Thomas Anderson, that's because, well, no-one really is doing it like him.) Even at the film's most expositional - a midstretch diversion to a karate club frequented by Willa and operated by benign sensei Benicio del Toro, all twinkly Zen - Anderson is busy coaxing DiCaprio to heights of mania that arguably surpass those of his Wolf of Wall Street turn, while arming his supporting players with skateboards to keep the wheels spinning. This sense of speed with precision is rare indeed in the contemporary cinema; it's been ten years since Mad Max: Fury Road, and in that decade, we've not seen anything much like it, even taking last year's prequel Furiosa into consideration. But you could get it just from listening to the film's finale, where three distinct engine sounds let us know exactly where the players are in a full-throttle chase along several miles of the bumpiest desert road. (If there were an Oscar for Best Location Scouting, the movie would win at a canter, and that'd be the only time it might be seen to pump the brakes.) In other places, though, Anderson's speed threatens the film's legibility; this is not a film that wants to be pinned down for questioning, which is what I suspect got it past WB's more conservative-minded executives, and why it's yielded the exhilarated responses it has. It's a film that moves so rapidly that the default position is simply to go along with it, yet it might be more interesting if we dig our heels in, offer some resistance of our own, and recognise how the film's brilliance comes to obscure its flaws.
Particularly in that second half, I felt Anderson distinctly trying to hustle us past OBAA's own politics, which had previously struck me as liberal in the ambiguous sense, Gavin Newsom liberal, and buried some way down - like that white-supremacist rabbit warren - beneath the film's fast-passing pronoun jokes and occasionally questionable supporting characterisations. However much you and I will enjoy it, I fear OBAA is also destined to be Quentin Tarantino's Film of the Year, which should give us all some pause for concern. For one thing, you wouldn't necessarily have to be practising left-wing purity politics to object to the way the film frames Perfidia as sexual gelignite, too hot for anyone to handle, even this camera, pantingly delineating Taylor's curves. The opening half-hour does kind of chime with those ungallant stories you may have heard about this filmmaker and Fiona Apple, and the idea that while Anderson is exceptionally good at dramatising doltish or confused men butting heads, he remains significantly less reliable in his depiction of women. Fathers driven to extremes on behalf of their daughters is the real site of One Battle After Another's revolutionary activity; mothers are an afterthought. (That's why Penn's magnificently cruel bastard gets a grand movie sendoff, while Taylor's character simply disappears into the movie's background, a bombshell who blew herself up.) Everything that's great about OBAA can be attributed to Anderson the pop-culture nostalgist, clinging to the books, films and sounds of an earlier era. (His needledrops here range from Steely Dan to Tom Petty, which doesn't seem all that far on the FM dial.) But the flaws come from that earlier era, too. This is the first film of the 21st century to bear serious comparison to the American studio movies of the 1970s, worthy of that oft-misapplied phrase major motion picture, but it's also worth wrestling with; if it's not quite a masterpiece as this director's Magnolia and There Will Be Blood were, it is a miracle that it exists in the here and now, particularly in this here and now, and that it arrives with the distribution it has, preceded by the WB logo. Just pray it doesn't tank.
One Battle After Another is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
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