by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $16.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Regina King, Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn, Alana Haim
Intro:
… a confronting and hardened thrill ride through the nightmare of modern America.
Having already mined gold from the words of Thomas Pynchon with the stoner-noir Inherent Vice, operatic absurdist Paul Thomas Anderson is back for round two; although, this is a much looser adaptation than his previous. Where Pynchon’s source novel Vineland dealt with the cultural arc from the Flower Power ‘60s to the Reagan ‘80s (a temporal gap that PTA has already explored across both Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights), One Battle After Another takes its core musings on ideals of rebellion and anti-authoritarianism and applies it to right-the-hell-now. It is his most emphatically and adamantly modern-minded film since Magnolia, and it is also his first proper action flick.
Opening on a literally-explosive scene as ‘Rocket Man’ Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and members of the revolutionist cell French 75 storm an immigration holding pen, the film keeps an intense and visceral energy through the entirety of its verging-on-three-hour run time.
From bombing raids on political headquarters, to long take chases through the labyrinthian network of the modern Underground Railroad, to one of the tensest car chases in recent film history, PTA and Michael Bauman (both credited for cinematography) bolster the filmmaker’s characteristically buttery-smooth sense of pace with invigorating electricity.
Building off its Taken-esque conceit of a restless former professional in Bob getting pulled back into his old ways to rescue his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti in a sucker-punch of a film debut), One Battle After Another continues PTA’s fascination with the way that generational ideals fade with time and uses it to examine how far some are willing to go in order to stick to them, or even betray them. On one end, there’s French 75, now full of memberships either long dead, turned rats, or stuck pining for the days when they felt useful, with Bob so blunted that he can’t even remember his old code words (reminiscent of Jesse Eisenberg’s sleeper-cell slacker in American Ultra).
And on the other, there’s Sean Penn as Col. Lockjaw, who might be PTA’s most damning statement on fragile masculinity. He is Frank T.J. Mackey without the tears, or Freddie Quell without the heartache. At once physically intimidating, bloody-minded to a fault, and remarkably pathetic. Going to horrifying extremes to hide his sexual proclivities, just so he can join the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, a name that sounds like a series of ‘reason for the season’ propaganda books for kids. Ridiculous, childish, a genuine threat; the enemy outlined in the plainest terms.
Both as a tribute to the unending fight against the translucent status quo, and admission of the Sisyphean task that is raising a child in this same environment (or indeed any environment), everything from the title down does a terrific job of highlighting the emphatic need to continue that journey. It puts Black expression squarely at the heart of its depiction of revolutionary action and methodology, from Gil Scott-Heron to Sheck Wes, and while some of its fervour is dampened by just how compromised those same ideals can be portrayed on-screen (Teyana Taylor as Perfidia in particular is a bit too complicated for the film to really do justice), there’s an earnestness and urgency to its figurative call to action that give all that adrenaline a knowledgeable place to flow into.
One Battle After Another is a confronting and hardened thrill ride through the nightmare of modern America. The kind of studio-system subversion that shows the process of building a bomb with prominent Budweiser product placement. It’s like an epic-length adaptation of Portugal. The Man’s ‘Feel It Still’, with a similarly raging inner conflict about fighting for the next generation both on the front lines and in the home. While not all of its messaging comes out clean on the other side, owing to PTA’s proclivity for messy and sprawling narrative structures, it’s still a highly entertaining film with some of the biggest thrills and laughs of the year.
