One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another, it’s called, and that’s no word of a lie. It begins with an attack — an announcement, an ambush — and then barely lets up at all. There is an opening half-hour of militant revolution, and then two hours of brutal, scrappy fallout, its central fugitive, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), lost in a weed fug amid kidnappings and breakouts and car chases and a sensei played by Benicio Del Toro. “This pussy ain’t for fun. The guns is the fucking fun,” says the firebrand fuelling the chaos, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, a Molotov cocktail in human form). For Paul Thomas Anderson, the filmmaking is the fucking fun. And never more so than here.

One Battle After Another never feels like a polemic. It is rooted in character and grounded in the filmmaking language of action directors. It hums and moves in ways that movies too rarely do, embedding any timely commentary one wants to read in it in entertainment. Anderson dropped out of film school when a professor told the students that they should leave if they wanted to make a movie like Terminator 2. He thought that Cameron’s sequel was a pretty awesome movie, and this story of rebellion feels like his own form of resistance against pretension. It’s also, crucially, a deeply humanist movie. Anderson cares about these characters deeply. Bob’s frustration becomes our own, as does his concern for Willa. So many films of our moment have felt angry or cynical, but Anderson’s movie transcends that by being human and even offering optimism. It’s not one loss after another. It’s one battle. Keep fighting.

One Battle After Another feels like contraband. It’s the sort of movie the Ministry of Culture would ban before offering the position of Head of the Ministry of Culture to its director. A Fritz Lang situation, if you will, where a nation-under-siege’s Best shoot their shot before being silenced or recruited–or they escape in the last crepuscular years before the curtain finally drops. It’s impolite. It’s outraged about what’s obviously outrageous and outspoken at a time when most everyone else is stunned into silence or cowed into surrender. It’s as sick of the bullshit as you are. A miracle, then. Or it feels like a miracle, anyway. Depending on how things go, we could eventually be talking about it the way we talk about Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. Do I exaggerate? If I do, it’s only by degrees. We are all in this pot together, and it’s hotter than you think. Not noticing has brought us to where we are: bright red and just south of parboiled. Do you notice? Paul Thomas Anderson does.