One Battle After Another

5 outta 5

One Battle After Another by writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson is a visceral action thriller that delivers PTA’s distinctive quirky style. There are fun asides, drawn out moments and unexpected random bits of weirdness. There’s also tension, some chases and a few big explosions and some good gunfire. It’s also incredibly horny for like the first twenty minutes but then settles mostly into a propulsive chase narrative. This movie is inherently about the chaos that would happen as a country slides into racial profiling and military fascism, which is unfortunately a very timely theme right now. One Battle After Another has an arthouse indie weird vibe combined with a snappy action thriller that leaves an impact.

In an authoritarian USA where the military divides and rounds up races and immigrant refugees, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a revolutionary in a relationship with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor). They are a part of a revolutionary group called the French 75 and exploding various buildings against the totalitarian authority. Unbeknownst to Pat, Perfidia is also in a twisted relationship with the military Captain Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Perfidia gets pregnant and raises the child with Pat, but things spiral out of control when she is captured, leaving Pat to raise their daughter. 16 years later, Pat, now known as Bob, is perpetually drunk and stoned and living with his teenage daughter, Wila (Chase Infiniti). She is restless about his constant paranoia that someone is going to come and try to take her, which is what eventually happens. With Wila on the run with a revolutionary protector, Deandra (Regina Hall), Bob reconnects with his former revolutionary group, which is a bit difficult as years of alcohol and drug abuse has erased the special revolution code words from his mind. So, he gets assistance from Wila’s karate teacher, Sensi Carlos (Benicio del Toro) to find her, but Lockjaw wants to find Wila as a secret cabal of white supremacists known as the Christmas Adventurers Club tries to clean up everything, permanently.

DiCaprio puts in a bravura performance as Pat/Bob. He starts out idealized, willing to blow stuff up for a righteous cause. The racist authoritarian military is very dislikable as they ask racial profiling questions and threaten family members of people to get information. So, whenever they get blown up, it’s okay. And Pat’s relationship with Perfidia swings from one extreme emotion of getting close together and as Taylor shows Perfidia being angry at him after the baby is born. What he doesn’t see is the twisted, intimate relationship she has with Lockjaw. Even though both are on the opposite sides of the conflict, they come together for angry hook up sessions. Lockjaw is constantly monitoring Perfidia, and when he sees her close with Pat, he creeps around Pat and says some weird things that not so subtly implies that Lockjaw and Perfidia are an item. It’s a twisted, dark relationship that is in contrast to Pat trying to be a source for good and light with her, and it all falls apart when she disappears.

His downfall is striking when years later when Pat is now Bob, and looking after his exasperated teenage daughter, Wila. He is boozing all the time, and when she finds out he drove, she rightfully flips out and DiCaprio drops one of Bob’s best lines “I know how to drive drunk!” One of the best bits is when he is calling to the revolutionary headquarters and asking for a rendezvous point to meet his daughter, but the voice on the other end keeps asking for a code word signal. Bob eventually is screaming that he doesn’t remember the code word after 16 years of booze and drugs, and DiCaprio hilariously shows his increasing levels of frustration. When he eventually gets the better of the voice on the phone, he greets him cheerfully with “Hey, prick!” There are a lot of funny moments from DiCaprio as Bob gets paranoid and frustrated, but he has good dramatic payoffs. When Bob comes face to face with his daughter in the finale, he is truly earnest and caring, which wins her over as she has been pushed to the brink.

Infiniti as the daughter shows a lot of growth as she is responsible for her boozy father and eventually endures hardship that makes her steely by the end. One of those hardships is Lockjaw, who is convinced she is his daughter, and Penn plays this nasty guy perfectly.  In a tense yet funny moment they wait for a DNA test result as she smack talks him, and his comebacks are lamely self defensive. Hall as the person who saves Wila and then has some big shocks happen. Probably the best supporting character is Sensi Carlos, and del Toro gives him some boozy stoner energy, yet still competent and able to offer support to Bob.

The sheer nastiness of the military that runs the country is prominent, as they break everything and snatch innocent civilians. It all seems very fascist and, sadly, very probable. The fact that there’s a White Nationalist cabal behind it all makes sense, and their questions about racial purity with a weird Christmas theme is bonkers. And while the movie isn’t wall to wall action, it is very propulsive as Bob careens from various crazy events. One Battle After Another certainly has a different vibe than any action film.