“One Battle After Another” is the latest release by Paul Thomas Anderson, the award-winning American filmmaker behind the modern classics “There Will Be Blood,” “Boogie Nights” and “The Master.”
The film’s lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio needs no introduction. Anderson and DiCaprio have toyed with the idea of collaborating for decades, with DiCaprio famously turning down the role of Dirk Diggler in “Boogie Nights” to play Jack in “Titanic,” but this is their first project together.
Anderson typically works on psychological dramas and period pieces. He has never been known for spectacle until his gargantuan new release. Filled with car chases and explosions, “One Battle After Another” finds Anderson at his most box-office friendly, while sacrificing none of the intelligence or sophistication of his previous work.
Based loosely on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel “Vineland,” “One Battle After Another” follows DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, once a member of an armed leftist revolutionary group, now living off the grid as a paranoid addict with Ferguson’s teenage daughter, Willa.
When Bob Ferguson’s old nemesis, Colonel Steve Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, leads a military operation to Ferguson’s home for his own nefarious reasons, he is forced to flee and hit the road in search of his daughter.
DiCaprio shows a previously unseen flair for physical comedy here. Hopelessly out of his depth as a single father, Lockjaw’s raid catches Ferguson with his pants down, and his numerous attempts to formulate a plan all blow up in his face, providing some of the film’s funniest moments.
Now much will inevitably be made of the politics of this film, as the main character is a masked vigilante who, in the opening scene, partakes in a raid of an immigration detention center. While the revolutionaries prove themselves to be thrill-seekers who abandon their ideals to save their skin at multiple different points, the film still seemingly goes after the U.S. government with some serious teeth.
In probably the best performance of the whole cast, Penn brings to life the best movie villain in years as an overtly racist colonel with a distinct walk and a voice that meshes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with John Wayne.
Penn tightropes a fine line between terrifying and pathetic. While his sad, self-parodying and insecure bigotry fuels his actions in the film, he always feels like a real and serious threat. Penn earns some big laughs at his expense, but he shares an incredibly tense scene with Chase Infiniti’s Willa (in an incredible debut performance) in the final act that feels genuinely life-or-death.
At its core, “One Battle After Another” is a father-daughter story set against a backdrop of an America engulfed in domestic militarized violence. Anderson excels at family dramas, and working within the confines of a genre film like this yields some of the best results of his career. Bob and Willa’s relationship feels fully realized, even if the two characters only share a handful of scenes with one another.
The father-daughter arc provides some nuanced commentary on violent forms of social change, as Willa must bear the consequences of her father’s violent past and decide how her parents’ legacy influences her life.
Of course, this commentary would not be nearly as impressive without its excellent action scenes. “One Battle After Another” was shot on Vistavision, an old, large-film format used only once since 1961 (in last year’s “The Brutalist”) that, in short, allows for a taller image with greater depth of field. The format allows for some of the most beautiful set pieces I have ever seen in an action movie.
The nighttime scenes make stunning use of silhouettes, particularly in a rooftop parkour scene, but the most impressive set piece is hands-down the final car chase through the desert. Taking queues from the chase in “The French Connection,” the camera is mounted on the front of a car, leaving only a few feet of clearance from the pavement as the vehicles pursue one another.
However, here, instead of a straight street through Brooklyn, the chase maneuvers an undulating desert road, creating an almost psychedelic effect as the cars rise and drop. The camera refocuses each time the car bounces over another hill creating an effect as jaw-dropping as it is stomach-churning.
All of these scenes boast some terrific musical compositions from longtime Anderson collaborator and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Meshing discordant piano riffs with upbeat drum solos, the score plays a major role in making the 160-minute runtime fly by with an uneasy paranoia.
Some reviewers have gone so far as to call this movie one of the best of all time. While I have problems with such extreme praise often setting audience expectations too high, I will say that “One Battle After Another” is a thrilling experience on its own terms. This is an entirely original thriller that draws small comparisons to other films but feels completely its own.
