One Battle After Another

Aren’t you tired of fighting? Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another comes along at a time in world history in which conflict seems to be the daily duty, turning Thomas Pynchon’s ’80s-set Vineland into a deeply humanist story of rebellion.

At the heart of One Battle After Another is Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a washed-up revolutionary living off the grid with his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). When Bob’s nemesis Lockjaw (Sean Penn) resurfaces after sixteen years, the former radical is forced to confront his past and fight for his daughter’s safety.

This epic screwball adventure is teeming with awe-inspiring action set pieces, Anderson’s most entertaining film yet while also one of his most thematically rich. It’s also a remarkably propulsive, fun, and eventually moving piece of work about the human beings caught up in the chaotic machine. It’s a live wire that drops in the first scene, setting off sparks for the next 162 minutes.

It opens with the kind of momentum usually reserved for the climax of an action film and barely slows down from there.

A revolutionary group known as French 75 is initiating an operation on the Mexico-U.S. border, where they take the officers hostage and release the immigrants awaiting processing. The group is led by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a confident force of rageful nature who finds the leader, Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and sexually humiliates him before walking him out of the base.

The whole encounter essentially fries Lockjaw’s horny brain, launching a psychosexual obsession with Perfidia, someone whom he sees as beneath him because he’s a racist monster, but someone who he also wants to sexually control him.

He essentially stalks Perfidia as she continues to lead the resistance with her partner Bob Ferguson, the two eventually having a child together named Willa.

Cut to 16 years later, Willa (Chase Infiniti) is a teenager, and Bob is a single father, still doing what he can for the revolution but equally worried about taking care of his daughter.

Lockjaw remains obsessed with the pair, initiating a series of raids and operations on French 75 members that forces Perfidia’s former ally Deandra (Regina Hall) into action, exfiltrating Willa from a high school dance. As Deandra tries to get Willa to safety, Bob requires the help of Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) to avoid Lockjaw’s troops.

Anderson collaborates again with Michael Bauman, who shot “Licorice Pizza,” and who does unflashy work here, using motion as a way to amplify tension.

Bauman and Anderson compose a few breathtaking shots—there’s an early one of the border wall that looks like a painting—but they mostly try to keep up with their characters as they glide in and out of safe places.

As for performance, DiCaprio gives a carefully modulated turn, playing the hazy immediacy of a character who may not be a leader of the cause but remains loyal to it, nonetheless. He puts his passion into the revolution when needed, but he knows to anchor this role in the love a father has for his daughter.

Taylor and Hall are expectedly great, but the performance that’s going to have people talking is Penn’s best work in years.

Many timely themes will be pulled out of Anderson’s script, but the idea that there’s an underground cabal of powerful white men who fret over racial purity and turn truth into mythology and vice versa feels like one of the timeliest.

And yet it never feels like a polemic. It is rooted in character and grounded in the filmmaking language of action directors. It hums and moves in ways that movies too rarely do, embedding any timely commentary one wants to read in it in entertainment.

It’s also, crucially, a deeply humanist movie. Bob’s frustration becomes our own, as does his concern for Willa. A ferocious American masterpiece.