Nearly two years after the start of production, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another arrived in theaters last weekend to wide critical acclaim, despite—or because of—the inevitable and overblown hype. Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, One Battle After Another follows Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), members of the radical group the French 75, along with their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) and longtime nemesis Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Unbeknownst to Bob, Willa is Lockjaw's biological daughter, conceived after a bust. Shortly after Willa's birth, Perfidia leaves home and disappears from the movie to continue her revolutionary work; when Lockjaw is invited to join a white supremacist secret society called the Christmas Adventurers Club, his past with Perfidia and Willa resurfaces, and he sends the military into sanctuary city and Ferguson hideout Baktan Cross to eliminate Willa and Bob before they destroy his chances at becoming a “respectable” member of society.
Penn has rarely been better, and Benicio Del Toro endears in a brief supporting role as a kooky smuggler (not altogether different from his career best performance earlier this year as Zsa Zsa Korda in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme); DiCaprio, on the other hand, plays Rick Dalton once again to diminishing returns. I certainly loved Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but the goofy bipolar schtick is getting old. Kevin Tighe distinguishes himself in just one scene, the film’s best, as a drooling, far-eyed member of the Christmas Adventurers Club (his chilling delivery of the line “Make it clean. So we can eat off the floor” is the only time you really feel that these guys and their organization are any sort of threat). Taylor is also effective as Perfidia, a committed radical and ambivalent mother who chooses “the revolution” over her family.
But what revolution are they fighting? Anderson’s transposition of the novel’s 1984 setting to the “present day” comes with a caveat: this is not our present, but a parallel movie reality, where 1960s-styled black anarchists commingle with contemporary military officials, anti-fascists, and a few token members of Generation Z (jokes about pronouns and “noise triggers” are especially clumsy). Pynchon’s characters are practically all that remain from the novel, but stripped of historical context, and given no relationship to the 21st century, they’re empty, directionless caricatures. One Battle After Another has as much to say about the world we live in as Top Gun: Maverick, which was also set in “the present” and somehow avoided naming the enemy country Tom Cruise and co. were fighting.
The French 75 constantly quote “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gil Scott-Heron (“Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day”), and that's the extent of their political articulation: pop catchphrases and poses long adopted by corporate America and far from subverted here. Without any mention of I.C.E., Donald Trump, or chants like “No Justice, No Peace," the enemy is largely unseen and ultimately undefined. If Anderson wanted to make a magical realist spin on our world in the vein of Repo Man, he could’ve had the military scooping up all non-white people; the French 75 would’ve had a defined enemy and the Christmas Adventurers Club would be scary rather than mildly amusing. The Christmas Adventurers Club may include members of the military, but if they have to send out one of their Lacoste wearing main dudes to take out Lockjaw, they can’t be that powerful, and they certainly haven’t infiltrated and transformed the government. Without any real villain—Lockjaw is too eccentric, unstable, and funny to be terrifying—the movie has zero tension or momentum from the start.
Action movies don’t have to be politically coherent, even if they involve the military, but One Battle After Another is clearly trying to say something about our country and the moment, without ever addressing any aspect of the moment. It loves its warriors though, whose actions are strictly replays of the Weather Underground—courthouse bombings, pop culture coding, limited liberations—with none of the political context of the last 20 years. One Battle After Another takes place in a political vacuum, where “the revolution” is just another lifestyle choice, like wearing a leather jacket, driving a Tesla, or listening to Steely Dan.
This is reinforced with a naif ending where Willa goes off to a protest (against what?) three hours away as Bob barely puts up a fight, already comfortably stoned and almost off camera. The movie ends with Willa getting in her car and driving off to Tom Petty's “American Girl," impossibly upbeat but played too straight to be ironic. In a letter, Perfidia tells her daughter to continue the revolution that she started but couldn’t finish, but again, what are they fighting for? Anderson never makes it clear.
But Anderson says go ahead and pull the trigger, it doesn't matter anymore; the fascists are here, they've taken over, and there's nothing you can do about it except kill yourself and everyone around you. The fascists are coming! Revolutionary violence is the only way! Snap, crackle, pop! But beyond Lockjaw's personal vendetta, where is the police state? Are black people not free in this universe? In the absence of any stated enemy, the French 75 are cardboard cutouts fighting just to fight, action figures with nothing to do but pose and have their strings pulled.
Armond White and other right-wing critics say that the film’s romanticization of violent left-wing radicals is “irresponsible,” but that’s assuming a level of significance and influence that movies simply don’t have anymore. Robert Altman presaged the assassination of John Lennon in 1975’s Nashville, and Martin Scorsese directly inspired an assassin with Taxi Driver; it’s hard to imagine anyone responding to One Battle After Another with that kind of passion or obsession. However, White is right on target when he writes that Anderson’s decision to avoid the present and work from exhausted 1960s counterculture archetypes is “a cowardly artistic choice.” At the very least, it's remarkably uninspired for such an accomplished filmmaker.
Even more disappointing is the film's plain, functional cinematography. Anderson has broken new ground in making car chases and shootouts boring, mostly by using extreme wide angle lenses and uncharacteriscally indistinct master shots. This distance destroys any immediacy the action might have had otherwise, and what's especially confusing is that Anderson has filmed action sequences quite well before: the climax of Magnolia is better executed than anything in One Battle After Another.
Anderson is essentially a liberal conformist, and his film is as politically vacuous as the current Democratic Party. Humorous but seldom funny, “action-packed” yet rarely exciting, One Battle After Another is uncharacteristically bland and often quite boring. Although Anderson's work has become baggier and shaggier since The Master in 2012, none of his previous films ever felt as thin as this. Neither fish nor fowl, unsuccessful as an action movie and without much else to offer, One Battle After Another is a stunning disappointment, the worst film of Anderson’s career so far.