One Battle After Another movie review: où est la résistance?

One Battle After Another is, alas, an artifact of the precise moment at which a once grand culture — I’m talking about the United States of America, for all its many, many deep and profound and inhumane faults — finally, perhaps irrevocably, crumbled. This movie, full of shrieking rage, bleak humor, and bitter irony about the current state of the self-proclaimed greatest nation on Earth, was greenlit two years ago, as the nation was in that Biden-powered post-first-Trump-administration minute when Wile E. Coyote has run off the cliff but is still hovering in the air, hoping beyond hope for rescue. And now the finished Battle is released at the very instant when collapse awareness is dawning and the Coyote produces a sign reading “Help!,” and plunges to his demise.

This is not a reflection on One Battle After Another, which is a big glorious hunk of a film: brash, chaotic, despairing about the state of the nation but trying to find a way to survive it. It is a reflection on how fast things are falling apart. It’s shocking to see that such a film as this, a studio endeavor with a big budget and blockbuster vibes over its anarchic indie heart, got produced at all, even a few years ago. It’s impossible to imagine that we will see its like again anytime soon. The furious hope it represents hasn’t been extinguished at large, but actually expressing it like this may damn well be impossible soon. (I hope I’m wrong about this, but I fear I’m not.)

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson based his script, very loosely, on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. But the novel looks back from the 1980s to the radicalism of the 60s, and the bulk of Anderson’s story is set today. As a result, Battle bays with an exasperation at what has passed by Generation X (of which both Anderson and I are part): a genuine counterculture, a true principled resistance. For as much as this movie is about our real world today, it’s also occurring in a sort of alt-timeline. The opening sequence is set in the early 2000s, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s (Killers of the Flower Moon, Don’t Look Up) feckless revolutionary Bob is running with American insurgent group French 75: holding up banks, blowing up the offices of politicians, and — oh so pointedly — rescuing migrants being held by the American military at a prisonlike detention center on the US–Mexico border. If stuff like this was happening 20 years ago, it certainly did not make the news; the best we managed was the biggest global anti-war protests ever, in advance of the US invasion of Iraq, which utterly failed in their goal and as such have made the many similar, if smaller protests that have taken place since feel pointless.

French 75 in this alt-history seems to be having a real impact, however. Which makes them a target for the powers that be that they’re fighting. And then, one of their own paints the bull’s-eye on that target in screaming-red neon.

During that people-heist on the border, Bob’s lover, the magnificently monikered Perfidia Beverly Hills (the mesmerizing Teyana Taylor), has an encounter with the camp’s commander, the rather sinisterly monikered Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (a terrifying Sean Penn: The Angry Birds Movie, The Gunman), that sets the stage for what comes next. Her taunting of him is spectacularly funny and absolutely excruciating, and underscores one of the thematic motifs running through the film: that it’s not morality or compassion or humanity that determines what’s legal and allowed, and what isn’t, but power alone, and that getting off on hurting people can be a perk of the job for psychopaths in positions of authority.

(It also underscores another running motif: that badass Black women are fronting the revolution because no one else has the balls to do so, leading ineffectual white men around by their dicks, quite literally, in the process. Unlike in some of Anderson’s earlier films, sex and terror are not subdued here but right out in the howling open.)

Unlike Lockjaw and his ilk, French 75 may be violent revolutionaries, but they haven’t actually been hurting anyone: they’re all about property damage. Until they aren’t. Once they’ve committed a crime too far, the organization is scattered, and Bob goes into hiding with his and Perfidia’s baby. Did I say that she was Bob’s lover? It’s more like he was her pet, and she definitely does not want to be domesticated by him or a kid. So she takes off.

Now, a decade and a half later, Bob is a stoner wastrel, and his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, a star in the making), is a high-school student with only hints of something terrible in her dad’s past… and then Lockjaw enters their lives again, and their situation, already tense and precarious, is threatened.

And so One Battle After Another is about how, on a personal level, everything falls apart, and what comes after, and what you do to keep your shit together (or not), and how you move forward (or not). It may not have any actual advice for those of us living through everything falling apart — beyond sticking by your friends and sticking it to the Man whenever you can — but it sure as hell is some outstanding in-flight entertainment for the freefall. Anderson is both earnest and winking with his genre-defying blend of weird satire (the rebellion customer-service hotline is a hoot), political horror (the secret cabal of white nationalists: yikes), and action movie all in one; the car-chase finale is a wonder, with a POV on hilly driving like nothing I’ve seen before. Anderson pulls it all off effortlessly, yet without making any of it easy for us.

Like the filmmaker’s other recent masterpieces, There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, almost no one here is likable. (Willa is one exception, but only because she hasn’t had much chance to get complicated and messy yet; Benicio Del Toro [Dora and the Lost City of Gold, Avengers: Infinity War] as a cool, competent cog in the French 75 machine is another). And yet we marvel at and revel in their personal disasterhood. It’s a rude and wild ride.

more films like this:
• How to Blow Up a Pipeline [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Hulu US | Kanopy US | BFI Player UK | Curzon Home Cinema UK]
• Night Moves [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Kanopy US | BFI Player UK]