Paul Thomas Anderson is one of Hollywood's great time travelers. He took us to turn-of-the-century oil country in There Will Be Blood, the 1950s London fashion world in Phantom Thread, and the '70s San Fernando Valley, twice, in Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza.
One Battle After Another is Anderson's first film in ages set in the present day, and partly for that reason, it grabs you and even smacks you in the face in a way that his other movies haven't. It's a prescient, mesmerizing, frequently hilarious and fearlessly political piece of work. It's also an action thriller staged on an epic canvas, with harrowing gunfights, daring rooftop escapes and poundingly visceral car chases, including one, staged on a rolling desert highway, that must be seen to be believed.
The exact time frame isn't specified, but from the opening sequence — in which a band of revolutionaries rescue immigrants from a detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border — it's clear that the moment is ours. The revolutionaries call themselves the French 75. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat, an explosives expert; a searing Teyana Taylor plays his lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills, who's fiercely dedicated to the group's radical principles.
The film's first half-hour catches us up in the heat and momentum of their reckless romance, and also in the tension and danger of their work, as they plant bombs in courthouses and in the offices of politicians who oppose abortion. Perfidia makes a powerful enemy of an Army colonel with the colorful name of Steven J. Lockjaw; he's played by an unnerving Sean Penn.
A dark, sometimes perverse game of cat-and-mouse ensues, and it all ends in betrayal and disaster; Perfidia vanishes, forcing Pat to go into hiding with their infant daughter, while many of the French 75 are rounded up or killed.
Sixteen years later, Pat, calling himself Bob Ferguson, is hiding out in a fictional town called Baktan Cross. (The film was shot across California and in El Paso, Texas.) His daughter, Willa, is now a smart, plucky teenager, played by the remarkable young actor Chase Infiniti — a fitting name, since the rest of the movie is basically one relentless pursuit. Lockjaw has located them and sent troops into Baktan Cross on the pretext of cracking down on immigrants. His true targets, though, are Bob and Willa.
Amid the chaos, father and daughter are separated. Willa is rescued by an old friend of her dad's, played by a terrific Regina Hall. Bob, meanwhile, narrowly escapes Lockjaw's clutches and calls on the French 75 for help. But he hasn't been in touch with them for years, and with his memory fried by booze and pot, he can't remember all the secret passphrases to confirm his identity.
DiCaprio has always been an underappreciated comic performer, and he hasn't been this funny or physically dynamic in a film since The Wolf of Wall Street. Bob spends most of the movie running around in a plaid bathrobe and sporting a messy man-bun, desperately trying to find Willa. He gets some help from Willa's extremely resourceful martial-arts teacher, played by a sensational Benicio del Toro. I'd watch a completely separate film focused just on del Toro's character and what he calls his "Latino Harriet Tubman situation," which offers migrants refuge and safe passage through Baktan Cross.
In 2014, Anderson directed a largely faithful adaptation of Thomas Pynchon's stoner-detective novel Inherent Vice. One Battle After Another takes far more creative liberties with another Pynchon work, Vineland, which was set in the '60s, '70s and '80s.
Although Anderson has shifted the time frame, the weave of zany dark comedy, sociopolitical satire and controlled narrative chaos feels unmistakably Pynchonesque. That's especially true of an outlandish subplot — or is it? — involving a shadowy cabal of Christian nationalists whom Lockjaw is involved with. Elsewhere, when protestors clash with riot police in Baktan Cross, the movie achieves the grit and immediacy of a guerrilla documentary.
It's safe to say that Anderson thinks America is in grim shape, which is nothing new: In two of his best films, There Will Be Blood and The Master, he argued that violence, greed and religious hucksterism are part of the national character. But Anderson isn't a cynic. I've always thought of him as a big-hearted pessimist, and here he's given us both a gonzo vision of a nation at war with itself and a deeply resonant father-daughter love story. What's ultimately most striking about One Battle After Another is its extraordinary tenderness as Bob and Willa try to find their way back to each other. The worst of times really can bring out the best of humanity. The best of movies, too.
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