The Pitch: “The revolution will not be televised,” though it may be reduced to hold music as young people inherit the failures of those who fought it.
The Verdict: They say all art is political, but maybe some art just poses against politics as a timely backdrop. In the foreground here, there’s a dadcore dramedy going on. One Battle After Another has Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) run around in the “dad robe” while a culture war rages behind him in the streets of America.
Beyond the opening fireworks, Bob doesn’t contribute a whole lot to the war itself. His most important function is to raise Willa, played by newcomer Chase Infiniti (whose name comes up in the credits like a muse’s invocation, as if this chase movie had been ready from the casting stage to ride over the rolling hills into Hollywood immortality).
Bob’s America is one where any pirate radio host, you or I, can have a black bag slipped over their head and be carted off to a potential torture chamber without due process. Agent provocateurs are likely to throw Molotov cocktails into the citizenry’s peaceful protests, at the behest of a military man with a stiff walk.
That man is Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, in another Oscar-winning performance), who is desperate to track down his possible daughter, the aforementioned Willa. Her DNA could jeopardize his chances of joining the Christmas Adventurers Club, a cabal of Christian-coded white supremacists who hail Saint Nick as if he were Satan.
Because of that, Lockjaw will stop at nothing to catch Willa, and since he’s got the full force of the federal government behind him, that means bad news for anyone living in Baktan Cross, a sanctuary city where Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) runs an underground railroad. “Got a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going at my place,” Sergio explains.
The extended sequence where Sergio tries to help Bob escape is what really elevates One Battle After Another, which is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best movie in years. This film meets the moment, and it has a momentum to it that almost never lets up. The viewer is bound to get swept up in that, just as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did when it awarded the movie Best Picture and Anderson Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay last Sunday.
The biggest hurdle One Battle After Another has to overcome is its characterization of the revolutionary turned “rat,” Perfidia Beverly Hills. Teyana Taylor breathes real life into the character and her struggle with postpartum depression, but Perfidia, as written, can’t always escape the mold of a hyper-sexualized fantasy that sprang from a white man’s mind. In this way, she represents a new breed of Manic Pixie Dream Girl—the Manic Nympho Gun Gal.
At one point, Anderson deliberately frames Perfidia with the male gaze, as Lockjaw runs his eyes over her midriff and booty while surveilling her from a parked car. “She was possessed,” Lockjaw says of her later, and in a way, that sums up the plot of the film. Deep down, One Battle After Another is about two white men fighting over possession of two Black women. Anderson makes it work as a piece of entertainment, but still, his epidermis is showing.