For a popular entertainment, One Battle is ultimately hopeful but not pandering. Viewers do not leave the theater with the spoon-fed feel-good reassurances offered by a Rocky or a Star Wars. The metric of success here is survival (for the two main protagonists, at least) – not triumph, just the ability to stay in the fight. The inspiring (and perhaps unearned) coda is true to the movie’s title – it is one battle after another, not one victory after another. Which at least holds out the hope that all is not lost, and the struggle endures.
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature, One Battle After Another was rapturously received by critics – and not just any critics, of which today there too many who assert that title – but by the most accomplished and respected voices in contemporary criticism. The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis praised One Battle as “brilliantly directed . . . exhilarating” and “shockingly urgent”; J. Hoberman in Film Comment lauds Anderson, “one of the few working Hollywood directors who might qualify for a degree in American Studies,” for producing “an impressive addition to the imposing edifice of [his] oeuvre.” Other leading critics have expressed similarly glowing sentiments, including Justin Chang (The New Yorker), Clarisse Loughrey (The Independent), Christina Newland (The I Paper), David Sims (The Atlantic), and Stephanie Zacharek (Time) among others. And the Academy is not far behind, having showered the film with thirteen nominations, including three for Anderson (picture, director, adapted screenplay), suggesting that the fifty-something auteur might finally walk off with the prize that has eluded him for decades, despite personally garnering eleven well-deserved nominations in the past.
One Battle After Another is “inspired” by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, and that sounds about right. The book is a shaggy dog story of a tale that sharply divided critics, who saw at work either a postmodern genius or a hipster too much in love with his own stoner cleverness. In either case, the influence the novel’s overarching structure and elements of some of its characters are plainly visible in the film. One Battle’s opening sequences follow the exploits of a band of domestic revolutionaries, more common at the turn of the seventies (when those events would have taken place in Vineland). The French 75 – more capable than, say, the Symbionese Liberation Army, but not in the same league as the Black Panthers – are led in part by the firebrand Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and her paramour in crime, explosives expert Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio). As Perfidia’s revolutionary exploits invariably impart an overwhelmingly erotic charge (she would rather urgently make love than flee the scene of a crime), not surprisingly, the couple are soon expecting a child. This contributes to some classic second-wave feminism domestic discontent regarding how to best balance work and family.
To the dismay of some of One Battle’s politically dogmatic detractors, with the exception of the extraordinarily successful operation that opens the film, the exploits of the French 75 come across as without obvious purpose (blowing up empty buildings), fueled by self-indulgent thrill seeking, and, worst of all, ultimately amateurish – crucially so when the gang offers something of a clinic on how not to flee from a bank-robbery-gone-wrong. In that context they attract the freelancing attention of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who also has eyes, and much more, for Perfidia, with whom he tangled memorably in an earlier escapade. With a motivated Lockjaw in pursuit and the bungled bank job leaving a bloody trail of evidence and captured comrades, in short order the surviving French 75ers are either imprisoned, summarily executed (one such abrupt, extrajudicial killing is shocking), or disappear underground.
Sixteen years later, as they say in the movies, Pat, now under the assumed identity of Bob Ferguson, is living quietly in bucolic Northern California, dividing his time between being a devoted dad and smoking lots and lots of pot while watching TV. Perfidia is long gone – Cuba or Algeria via Mexico it would seem – and their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), now sixteen, is emerging as an impressive young woman, though she still provides the age-appropriate angst that adolescent daughters will. We meet her in the company of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), a preternaturally serene martial arts instructor who also supervises an improvised underground railroad on behalf of undocumented migrants. Unchanged over the years is Colonel Lockjaw, who has, thrillingly for him, come to the attention of the Christmas Adventurers, a secret society of white supremacists composed of business titans, government officials, and military affiliates.
The crisis of the second part of One Battle is set in motion when Lockjaw realizes that the extensive background checks undertaken by the Christmas Adventurers attendant to his application might expose his former affiliation with Perfidia, which, were it to come to light, as the expression goes, would be frowned on. Given the impressive militarized resources at his disposal, Lockjaw sets out to find those who became Bob and Willa, with orders to his men to “capture the female, bag and tag the male.” The early stages of that manhunt, which ensnare some scattered, largely vestigial remnants of the French 75, activate the low-tech alarm bells still functional across the long-dormant network, triggering the overlapping varieties of chase and flight that characterize the movie’s frenetic final ninety minutes.
There is much to praise in One Battle After Another, both in front of and behind the camera. The cinematography, by Michael Bauman, is impressive, most notably with the beautiful backlighting during a rooftop-to-rooftop nighttime chase sequence (and with the smoke and blues featured in the melee on the streets below); the score, by Radiohead lead guitarist and keyboardist Jonny Greenwood (his sixth score for Anderson), also shines, and works well in distinct modes that mesh with the needs of a given moment. And writer-director Anderson’s many talents are well on display; the movie is 162 minutes long but is briskly paced and has a propulsive energy; camera compositions are thoughtful but not showy (note especially the long shot late in the narrative as a prisoner changes hands); and the final roller-coaster ride of a car chase is quite something. And this high-stakes suspenser often finds time to include some laugh-out-loud humor. Few in the audience will not relate to the frustrations of an exasperated Bob, his memory fried by years of substance abuse, when he is unable to satisfy the demands of “comrade Josh” on the phone – the radical underground’s equivalent of a Kafkaesque customer service provider.
DiCaprio is to be applauded for a nuanced performance in a thoroughly unglamorous role (and not once does he succumb to the movie star urge to subtly wink at the audience); Chase Infiniti, in her debut feature, and Regina Hall, as Deandra are also excellent. And with the performance of the film (and the character of the film) Benicio Del Toro provides the movie’s moral grounding. The only hesitation one might have about this character and his performance is that it is perhaps too good to be true – this is no Marvel movie, to be sure, and no buildings are effortlessly scaled by hand, but the cool, courageous, efficiency of the Sensei, showcasing what Hemingway defined as “grace under pressure,” approaches superheroic proportions. Many of the secondary roles are also superbly cast. I have a soft spot for the earnest efforts of Sommerville (Paul Grimstad) and was moved by his capture (“Billy Goat is in the wind”); his interrogator, Danvers, played by nonprofessional actor James Raterman, gives an astonishingly realistic (and quite chilling) performance, perhaps because he has a real-life background in state security – Anderson approached him for the part after seeing Raterman’s career featured in a documentary.
One Battle, an often frenetic movie, also has a few quiet things to say. There is a discomfiting parallel between Perfidia and Lockjaw – each of whom abandoned their parental responsibilities in order to pursue (what Lockjaw states explicitly as) “a higher calling.” Such similarities between these two characters (and there are others) have also irritated the strident few who have resisted this movie’s charms. In the popular discourse, some conservative figures lambast the film for celebrating the violent radicalism of the French 75, whereas others on the left have been appalled by the cartoonish portrayal of those same revolutionaries (and especially of black women) in the first part of the film. Both miss the point. The French 75 are hardly inspirational (its white members offer little to emulate); if anything, the principal comparison here is not between the reactionaries and the revolutionaries but between the ineffectiveness of the early, chest-pounding performances of radical confrontation and the quiet achievements of the underground movement led by Sensei St. Carlos.
Finally, for a popular entertainment, One Battle is ultimately hopeful but not pandering. Viewers do not leave the theater with the spoon-fed feel-good reassurances offered by a Rocky or a Star Wars. The metric of success here is survival (for the two main protagonists, at least) – not triumph, just the ability to stay in the fight. The inspiring (and perhaps unearned) coda is true to the movie’s title – it is one battle after another, not one victory after another. Which at least holds out the hope that all is not lost, and the struggle endures.
Having said all that, One Battle After Another, a first-rate movie worth seeing, has met with excessive praise by the serious critical community. One reason for this is the coincidence of its timing. Anderson had long been inspired by the source material (Vineland was published in 1990 and set in 1984), and, say what you will about the Reagan era, what was once a fever dream has now become a stark reality. That opening sequence, with the migrants at the detention center, and the brutal, lawless behavior of militarized state authority throughout the film more generally, seem to have a horrifying prescience, as they so accurately capture, to a heartbreaking extent, what is going on in the streets of our cities today. These could not have been imagined when the film went into production (and it is unlikely that a major studio would dare touch this material today) – but it is impossible not to watch the film through the urgency of those lenses.
There are other reasons to be wary of the some of the sustained standing ovations that One Battle has received. It is an unglamorous part of their job that most of the movies critics are required to see are not very good, and even more rarely are they ambitious. Thus when a good movie does come along, critics, having wandered through the wilderness of endless vapidity, can celebrate it like an oasis in the desert. Often the good becomes the very good, and the very good the excellent. And why not? A pleasure of serious criticism is the ability to call attention to the worthy that might slip under the radar screen of the broader public – and Paul Thomas Anderson films often, as they say euphemistically in the trade papers, “underperform” at the box office.
Whereas Anderson is a proverbial critics’ darling. As Zacharek wrote in her review, “those who consider themselves serious film people greet each new [Anderson film] as an Important Event.” Once again, in that context, praise can easily morph into overpraise – although a skewed reaction to the release of a revered master can cut both ways. A “pretty good” movie (or new album issued by a legendary artist) can be unfairly lambasted simply because it does not live up to the standard set by a stellar track record. But that same effort, dismissed as minor and unworthy, had it been the early release of a relative unknown, would be hailed as heralding the arrival of a major new talent. In this instance, however, it is the former inherent (critical) vice that shows its hand.
“Well short of a masterpiece” are not normally fighting words, but they stand out in this discussion. One Battle has several problems. The most obvious concern its bad guys, who are thinly-drawn caricatures of pure evil. It is certainly the case that such people do exist – indeed, to our collective horror, many of them currently hold high positions in the White House. A great dramatic film, however, is generally measured by the charisma and sophistication of its bad guys, and on that score, our mustache-twirling white supremacist antagonists have not much to offer. As the principal bad guy, Colonel Lockjaw certainly commands the viewer’s attention. And Penn’s performance, especially in its disciplined physicality, is commendable. But Penn, one of the great actors of his generation (for recent evidence of this see his mind-bending incarnation of Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell in the 2022 mini-series Gaslit), isn’t really asked to do much other than be a really bad guy. Even in his best scene, a confrontation with Willa, he is limited by the range of options accessible to the character.
In addition, and especially on reflection, there are also a number of key plot points in One Battle that seem somewhat forced. Among these pivotal moments is a crucial decision made by the bounty hunter Avanti (Eric Schweig), the underlying motivation of which seems more convenient than compelling. However, I’m inclined to let most of those go, in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock, who, when confronted by Ingrid Bergman about her inability to grasp the motivation of her character, responded “Fake it Ingrid, it’s only a movie.” The obsessive and meticulous auteur was faking it himself with that line, but the point is well taken. It is only a movie.
Nevertheless, to gain admission into the pantheon of the truly great, a movie must pass what can be dubbed “the Scorsese test.” In his thoughtful definition of cinephilia (a response to the avalanche of criticism he received for comments he made about Marvel movies), Scorsese explained that for he and his cohort, “cinema was about revelation – aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It was about characters – the complexity of people and their contradictory and sometimes paradoxical natures [and] the way they can . . . suddenly come face to face with themselves.” By this metric, One Battle falls short.
One Battle has but two scenes of such moving revelation (admittedly, this is two more times than in most mainstream movies). The first is when Willa’s transponder goes off when she is alone in the bathroom at the high school dance. Deandra arrives to extract her from a dangerous situation and spirit her away. The scene lasts eighty seconds, in which the camera is almost exclusively on Willa’s face (Anderson frames the two-shot by showing Deandra in a mirror.) In those brief moments no action takes place other than Willa processing that her father’s warnings over the years were not stoner paranoia but the actual truth. (Less than two movie minutes before this, she had snapped at him dismissively, as only a teenage daughter could – “no one is coming to get you, Bob, you know that, right?”) It is an emotionally overwhelming moment, expressed minimally as the camera observes the eyes and the face of a young woman whose entire life story is now being rewritten in her mind. A similar scene occurs, also calm but much more confrontational, when Willa arrives at the convent where she is brought for safekeeping, and meets Sister Richelle (April Grace). In another brief, quiet conversation, Willa is forced to reassess everything she (thought she) understood, not about her father but about her absent mother. In a movie often propelled by frenetic action, there is a stillness here that is breathtaking – and once again both the lighting and the framing (in this instance a tight shot, held for a full minute, of the two women in profile) is impeccable. Those who took offense at One Battle’s portrayal of black women should consider the strength, dignity, autonomy, and agency of these three characters (and several others), here and more generally.
Ultimately, One Battle After Another is entertaining, beautiful, accomplished, and depressingly timely (a final screen credit to Warner Bros. at the very end serves as an ominous, unintended reminder of the precarious state of independent media in America). It is surely worthy of high praise, and has caught the wave of our current national horror show. But will it endure as a classic, that movie lovers return to repeatedly over the years? I suspect not.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
