Once upon a time we would say to our teenagers, “Be careful,” as they headed out for a night with friends, or maybe out on a date, or perhaps to a school dance. Now, we say it as they head to a protest. That’s not their fault, or ours, but rather the fault of those who have enabled and enacted a United States government that wantonly wields violence, abuse, and corruption in ways that are unconstitutional and anti-American.
One Battle After Another—notably unlike many of our current politicians and high-profile media outlets—understands the urgency of this moment. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, There Will Be Blood), the movie is not political in the sense that it argues against a political direction we may be heading or offers an alternative political vision to our current circumstances. It is simply mirroring them, through a comically absurdist, satirical lens that is both cathartic and galvanizing. To hesitantly paraphrase the rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement, One Battle After Another just wants to breathe. Watching it, right now, feels like taking in a breath of desperately needed fresh air, with the intent of living to fight another day.
Anderson loosely adapts the 1990 Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, which centers on a burnt-out former hippie whose past comes back with a fury around the time of Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection. Moving that scenario to our current era, One Battle After Another stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, an explosives expert and member of an underground resistance collective. Known as The French 75, the group uses guerrilla tactics against an American government employing violence against citizens and ignoring due process all under the guise of immigration control. (Sound familiar?)
The French 75 hits back hard. “Make it good, make it bright,” Bob is told in the crackerjack opening sequence by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a French 75 leader who has organized a takeover of a refugee detention center. While her team extracts those being held prisoner (not “violent criminals,” as the government claims, but mostly terrified women and children of a certain skin color), Perfidia kicks in the door of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and subjects him to a particular sort of humiliation that I won’t spoil here.
I also won’t detail much of what comes after, except to note that Bob and Perfidia are a romantic couple. When she becomes pregnant, his parental instincts kick in. Hers decidedly do not. The film then jumps ahead 16 years later to Bob in washed-up mode (his greasy ponytail the only thing he seems to have retained from his revolutionary past). Paranoid and reclusive, he’s doing his best to care for his daughter Willa, now a teenager (newcomer Chase Infiniti). Willa is approaching adulthood in a world that hasn’t gotten any better—and indeed gets worse when Lockjaw begins sniffing around.
Lockjaw, Perfidia Beverly Hills. As you can see from those names alone, One Battle After Another has a Pynchonian playful streak; despite its serious subject matter, this is an exhilaratingly funny movie. Much of the humor comes from the performances, including Penn’s constipated portrayal of an authority figure whose moral compass has become so perverted he can hardly walk. In his clownish posturing, he captures the performative silliness of so many of the ICE agents currently patrolling our perfectly safe streets. (“Why is your shirt so tight?” Willa asks Lockjaw at a crucial moment, a phrase I hope to see on a protest sign at some point.)
As Bob, DiCaprio gives us a first-rate dimmed bulb—dimmed largely by drugs, but also by the psychic weight of a failed revolution and the burden of raising a child in this climate (a biracial child, in particular). With darting eyes and a dingy bathrobe, he’s in the tradition of Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski and Joaquin Phoenix in Inherent Vice (Anderson’s previous Pynchon adaptation). It takes a bit for the performance to shift into high comic gear, but once Bob shows up stoned and weepy at a parent-teacher conference—“If I get emotional, it’s just tears of joy, that’s all.”—DiCaprio puts the pedal down and never lets up.
My favorite turn, however, comes from Benicio del Toro in a supporting role. He plays Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a martial-arts teacher in the sanctuary town in which Bob and Willa live and which Lockjaw has invaded under the pretext that crime is rampant. (Again, sound familiar?) Sergio presides over a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” with a bemused, spiritual calm befitting (one aspect of) his name. I struggled with the confinements placed on del Toro in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme; here, he’s free to rumble through the madness of One Battle After Another as the grumbly sage that he is.
Among the movie’s many stunning set pieces is an extended section in which Bob tags along after Sergio while he puts his particular underground railroad in motion. At one point, Bob tries to keep up with some skaters working with Sergio, as they lead him across a series of rooftops far above the government-incited chaos happening below. Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman largely shoot this from a distance, in silhouette, giving it a sense of mythical grace—until it’s comically undercut by Bob’s clumsiness.
The shot of the film, however, comes during a climactic, three-car chase set in a stretch of desert hills. At one point the camera is placed on the hood of a vehicle as it lolls up and down the undulating road. It’s anxiously mesmerizing in a way that induces both sleepiness and nausea—which is pretty much exactly what it’s felt like to be an aware American during the last 10 years. Also disorienting is Jonny Greenwood’s plinking, discordant score, which recalls not so much his previous work with Anderson (including Phantom Thread, The Master, and There Will Be Blood), but rather the ambient noise Jon Brion composed for Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. Both works burrow us into the cacophony taking place in the main character’s head.
Punch-Drunk Love might be the closest thing in Anderson’s filmography to One Battle After Another, in that it similarly feels distinctly his. Yes, this has the propulsion of paranoia thrillers from the 1970s, such as The French Connection, as well as the beating heart for humanity that was found in Alfonso Cuaron’s prophetic, refugee-minded Children of Men. But One Battle After Another is not as indebted to any particular filmmaker or film the way Phantom Thread is to Hitchcock and There Will Be Blood is to Citizen Kane. This is a movie that’s not only singular to the filmmaker behind it, but to the moment it’s in.
Yet it’s no mere mirror, or even a satirical release valve like, say, the verbal jabs of a late-night comic. Without taking itself too seriously (self-conscious seriousness, after all, being a signature of authoritarianism), One Battle After Another serves as a call to action. (And here I suppose I have to be clear that this is not the same as endorsing the violent tactics of The French 75.) If the movie seems to rank among Anderson’s best work right now, I hope for a day when it drops down that list. This will mean we’ve made it to a better, truer United States of America. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be able to say “Be careful” to a grandchild as they head out, simply to hang with their friends.
(10/1/2025)
