Paul Thomas Anderson’s countercultural drama-thriller One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is a formal enigma that has perplexed, provoked and entranced, and the year ends with no definitive consensus as to its exact meaning. A rare naysayer is screenwriter and film-maker Paul Schrader, who commented tersely online: “Film-making at level A+, but try as I might I couldn’t muster up an ounce of empathy for Leo DiCaprio or Sean Penn. I kept waiting for them to die.”
But that’s why the film is gripping: there is indeed no empathy for its two unlovely leading males, and their mortality and vulnerability has a kind of unwinding, entropic energy. They are heading for disaster. And yes, the film-making is A+ or A++; it is supercharged with pleasure at its own audacity and expertise. It is moviemaking with a late-Kubrick elegance and a knowing theatricality, culminating in an exhilarating but also eerily strange car chase on an undulating freeway. This isn’t the same as style without substance, but it’s certainly a movie that can’t help put promote its self-aware style to equal status with its subject matter: a petty-tyrannical America of the present and future, and those who will grow old in resisting it from within.
The question that can’t quite be answered is of when and where it is supposed to be set. The US of 10 or 20 years ago? Or an alt-reality imagined version of America in the present; a bizarro-world America? This knight’s-move it takes away from a recognisable contemporary world is partly a function of adapting Pynchon, with his playfully cartoonish imagination, and moreover updating his novel, whose present-day action was supposed to be taking place in the Reaganite 80s, with flashbacks to the freaky 60s. The story is now moved forwards to some time between the Obama and Trump years – or diagonally out to some new narrative zone. The title envisions endless crises and the forever culture war of modern life.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, a former revolutionary who was once part of an activist cell attacking migrant-holding prisons on the Mexican border. He has aged gracelessly into a grumpy, boozy, dishevelled loser. His partner in his glory days was Perfidia, played by the radioactively charismatic Teyana Taylor. Perfidia succeeded in sexually entrancing the bullnecked blowhard in charge of counter-insurgency intelligence, Col Steven Lockjaw, played with reptilian fanaticism by Sean Penn.
Lockjaw’s infatuation with her, in which racist fetishism fuses with a poignantly abject rapture, is something that Perfidia tries to toy with, to control military opposition. But it all goes terribly wrong, she gets pregnant, and her daughter Willa, played by Chase Infiniti, is to be subject to the movie’s paternity-claim crisis. Who is America’s authentic parent: the reactionary or the radical?
DiCaprio, Penn, Taylor and Infiniti are all commandingly brilliant and the score by Jonny Greenwood is superb. One Battle After Another is a protest song of a film, whose lyrics are about cruelty and despotism and the heroism of dissent.
