Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, features Leonardo DiCaprio as a washed-up revolutionary.
As a filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson is a master of slow-moving understatement that gradually unfurls into something compelling.
There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread have enraptured his admirers, but can frustrate those seeking cinematic pyrotechnics.
One Battle After Another, a counter-culture caper that’s based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, is a different beast. It feels like a peak-era Tarantino, but with Anderson’s more thoughtful and measured underpinnings lying beneath the irony, comedy, and action.
Initially, the focus is on Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia, a machine gun-toting revolutionary in the ‘French 75’ group. She and her partner Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) are living a transgressive dream by freeing detained immigrants and sticking it to the establishment.
A robbery gone wrong results in Perfidia’s arrest. Military stickler Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) ends up with her in his pocket, and Bob has to go on the run with a young baby.
A decade and a half later, he’s washed up and living off the grid with a teenage daughter named Willa (Chase Infiniti).
What follows is not a touching coming-of-age daddy-daughter drama, however. Lockjaw’s desperation to join a racist secret society results in his need to tie up loose ends. This sets up a chase movie which pits Bob’s decayed revolutionary skills against Lockjaw’s determined cruelty.
Whether it’s a coincidence or prescience, One Battle After Another feels incredibly urgent at a moment when America has a government that is desperate to crack down on dissent.
However, its strength is its lack of earnestness – it’s a film that can deliciously flip between deadly serious themes and comedic farce, meaning it’s very entertaining as it skewers the absurdity of our times.
DiCaprio is fantastic in depicting Bob as a trained revolutionary who has regressed with age to become a bumbling oaf, while Penn is both menacing and completely ridiculous – a perfect personification of America’s recent turn towards authoritarianism.
In support, newcomer Infiniti gives her character a soulful innocence that grounds the chaos around her, while both Benicio del Toro and Regina Hall have smaller roles as calmer, more capable adjuncts to the rebel underground.
But ultimately, the star is the script. It provides laugh-out-loud moments while constantly putting you on edge and capturing Pynchon’s bleakly complex satire.
While they garner critical praise, it must be acknowledged that Anderson’s films can be something of an acquired taste. They are often films you either end up loving for their intricacies and studied quirks, or just don’t get.
One Battle After Another is different. While it keeps the director’s love of detail and the unexpected, it’s a classic comedy crime caper. One that leaves you on the edge of your seat between laughs.
Because of that, it manages the remarkable achievement of pointing to our troubled times while making you forget them because you are enjoying yourself.
As a result, this may both be Anderson’s least serious film – and yet, in its own way, his most important.
In cinemas from Friday 26th September.
By Mark Worgan.
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