One Battle After Another review: 'an instant masterpiece'
Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilarating new film takes us on a wild ride through America’s radically divided political landscape, writes Alistair Harkness
One Battle After Another (15) ★★★★★
Paul Thomas Anderson raises the filmmaking bar with One Battle After Another, a blistering cinematic coup d’état against the atrophied ambitions of most big budget filmmaking. Capitalising on Leonardo DiCaprio’s box-office cache, he’s taken slippery source material ― Thomas Pynchon’s freewheeling 1990 novel Vineland ― and transformed it, thrillingly, into a wild ride through America’s radically divided political landscape, not with hectoring polemics, but with an exhilarating, brilliantly directed story shot through bank robberies, immigration raids, white supremacist cabals, gun-toting nuns, one beer-guzzling karate sensei (played by Benicio Del Toro), and an audacious climactic car chase that manages to thoroughly re-invent this over-used action movie staple.
Fittingly for a film with such an eccentric cast of characters, it also has DiCaprio on gloriously buffoonish form as our pseudonymous hero, Bob Ferguson, a dope-addled burnout forced to contend with his radical past when his teenage daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti) is targeted by the soldier (Sean Penn) responsible for arresting her militant mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), 16 years earlier.
Anderson spends the first hour of One Battle After Another’s propulsive 165-minute running time laying out Bob and Perfidia’s antics as members of an underground resistance group known as the French 75, whose opening liberation of an immigrant detention centre arouses the interest (and more) of Penn’s character, Col. Stephen J Lockjaw, a ramrod-straight weirdo whose powerlessness before Perfidia’s sexually charged, Angela Davis-esque revolutionary only intensifies his obsession with her.
It’s Perfidia’s uncompromising zeal that eventually brings down the French 75 and when we pick up the story just over a decade-and-a-half later, Bob is lost in a cannabis fog, tethered to reality only by his love for Willa, whose existence reignites Lockjaw’s interest in their off-the-grid family as his own invitation to join a shady, well-funded group of Christian white supremacists forces him to revisit his own past and clean house.
What follows as Bob tries to wrap his zonked-out brain around the threat to his daughter’s life is purposely funny and scary as Anderson ― packing a lot in ― shows how the outwardly clownish details of this world can’t diminish the authoritarian impulses at play in the story.
Though only very loosely inspired by Vineland (Anderson hasn’t really tried to adapt Pynchon’s densely layered prose the way he did with Inherent Vice), One Battle After Another nevertheless retains the radical spirit of its politics, particularly its postmodern meditation on the US government’s ongoing efforts to streamroller dissent out of existence. The end result is a blockbuster with purpose, a crazy epic about where we are right now, how we got here and why despair isn’t the answer. An instant masterpiece.
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