One Battle After Another

Rated R • Theaters

Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie One Battle After Another begins with the French 75, a far-left extremist group at their most dangerous—blowing up buildings and staging prison breaks. Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are members who fall in love, drawn close in their unhinged vigilantism. They have a baby girl together and that’s when the story really starts.

The movie jumps ahead 16 years, and Bob is washed up, out of the game, but he emerges from hiding when he and his daughter are tracked to his remote house. The trouble is he can’t remember how to be a revolutionary. Throughout most of the movie he scrambles around in a bathrobe, always a step or two behind the action. He and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) flee, and the movie sprawls in all directions.

Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn)—a comical figure with a stiff gait reminiscent of George C. Scott’s Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove—serves as the film’s antagonist. He’s built his career on rounding up illegal immigrants and French 75 members. Because of his exploits, a white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club recruits him to join their ranks.

If this movie sounds ridiculous, that’s because it’s loosely based on a satirical novel called Vineland by the postmodern recluse Thomas Pynchon. Despite the plot’s hard edges, One Battle After Another possesses a warmth amid the high jinks. After all, the father/daughter relationship drives the story.

This movie, rated R, has gun violence, crass humor, and a deluge of foul language, but it showcases Anderson’s master touch. A car chase at the movie’s climax is an exhilarating sequence. The director uses a telephoto lens to follow the speeding cars up and down the desert blacktop, giving the audience the sense of being inches above the road. Somehow Anderson found a new way to show something that’s been filmed many times over. Movies might not be dead after all.