One Battle After Another is an astonishingly entertaining film. It’s also so incredibly of-the-moment and full of career-best performances that it’s an instant Oscar frontrunner.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s genre-defying movie, in theaters Sept. 26, stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a washed-up revolutionary who lives in a state of stoned paranoia. He’s surviving off-grid with his spirited and self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis (Sean Penn) resurfaces and Willa goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her as both father and daughter battle the consequences of their pasts.
In short, Anderson made a stoner-dad political satire about how each generation finds themselves befuddled by the next, no matter how subversive and revolutionary they were in their youth.
Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, One Battle After Another explores aging, activism and idealism. It focuses on the reality of being young and vigorously dedicated to making the world a better place, and then getting older and becoming more conservative, as your parents likely always said you would, and how those forces cause activism and idealism to stall out over time. It’s cyclical!
Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. (Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection)
The film also addresses the uncomfortable and dark forces permeating our country, but in a darkly hilarious — and action-packed — way. It’s an incredible feat to make the idea of a secret society of white supremacists laugh-out-loud funny, but Anderson pulls it off, and in the process highlights the absurdity of the belief system.
Penn is unbelievable as the antagonist Col. Steven Lockjaw, who shares a complicated history with DiCaprio’s Bob. His physicality is so appropriately sickening that it’ll stick with you. He makes you understand the insecurity that’s brewing behind hatred and rage, and the more we learn about this character and what drives his actions, the more chilling his parallels to our current society become.
Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn in One Battle After Another. (Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection)
But you don’t even have to get bogged down by the meaning of it, because the film is a five-star experience as pure blockbuster spectacle, never didactic or lecturing. It’s punctuated by tons of action, including shoot-outs and car chases, including one of the most riveting and impeccably photographed ones I’ve ever seen, which really takes advantage of its hill-ridden road.
Regular PTA collaborator Jonny Greenwood, better known outside of cinemas as Radiohead’s lead guitarist, returns with a jaunty and propulsive score that’s always shifting as the movie continually changes gears.
DiCaprio is typically excellent, earning tons of laughs in a role that, at a certain point, becomes “what if an Ethan Hunt type of guy was too stoned to remember the very important passcode needed to get his impossible mission?” Infiniti also stands out as Leo’s daughter in a revelatory debut performance that helps get to the emotional core. Teyana Taylor also makes a hell of an impression despite limited screen time, and Benicio Del Toro is a delight here, in his second picture of the year directed by an Anderson.
Benicio Del Toro in One Battle After Another. (Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection)
But the real surprise of One Battle After Another is the tenderness underneath it all, and how this is ultimately just a story about a father and a daughter attempting to bridge the gap that’s come between them. Those small personal stakes, writ large, carry much deeper meaning about what the future holds for us all and how we can start to understand each other better.
It’s also rare to see a studio movie of this size take on politics at all, let alone have such a distinct and clear point of view on the state of the world, and for that, I am thankful. It’s so timely that it opens with the revolutionaries in the film freeing immigrants from an ICE detention center.
It also arrives at a historic moment for Warner Bros., on an unprecedented hot streak of seven movies in a row opening over $40 million. But it’s also a perilous one for this particular film, which cost more than any previous work from writer-director Anderson.
DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson on set. (Warner Bros./Courtesy of Everett Collection)
Anderson, who also directed There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, is widely beloved by critics and cinephiles, and his 11 Oscar nominations and zero wins make him one of the most nominated filmmakers to never win. But he’s not known for huge grosses. The idea must’ve been that pairing him with an unmissable star like DiCaprio was worth the considerable risk the project carried.
Luckily for Warner Bros., and even luckier for audiences, One Battle After Another is the very best film of the year, and one of the most exciting American films of the decade.
One Battle After Another opens in theaters nationwide on September 26th
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