One Battle After Another

 

Lovers Ghetto Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are members of the French 75, a revolutionary terrorist group. After they raid an immigrant detention facility, the facility’s commanding officer, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) becomes obsessed with Perfidia. He eventually catches up to her and offers her protection in exchange for her selling out her comrades. Years later, Pat is living as “Bob Ferguson” and raising the couple’s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) as a single father when Lockjaw reemerges and threatens to cause trouble once again.

Dense and weird, nothing about Thomas Pynchon’s writing screams “filmable,” yet his brand of paranoid Americana seems to have found a champion in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. After previously adapting Inherent Vice, in One Battle After Another, Anderson gave Vineland a go. It’s a much looser adaptation, and despite its many idiosyncrasies, it amounts to something resonant.

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington, One Battle After Another uses violent set pieces to underscore political satire. Johnny Greenwood’s relentless (some might say overbearing) score makes for constant tension, and the film boasts more shoot-outs, car chases, and rooftop-hopping parkour escapes than you can shake a stick at. At the same time, it is unabashedly goofy, which grants it some much-needed levity. A stoned-to-the-gills Pat goes full Karen over the phone on an underground contact who hassles him for a pass phrase while the country club cabal to which Lockjaw tries to ingratiate himself interrogates him with all the faux-geniality of The Bobs from Office Space.

Unlike Eddington, the characters here feel specific and fully formed, which gives the capable cast far more to work with. DiCaprio has carved out an unlikely niche in recent years playing overwhelmed has-beens, and Pat is an amusingly volatile blend of parental good intentions and drug-addled incompetence. Penn gives one of his best performances in years as Lockjaw, a ruthless authoritarian thug who would be terrifying if he weren’t so pathetic and weird: note the atrocious haircut and rigid gait. Infiniti makes a strong screen debut, playing Willa as both defiant and conflicted. Benecio del Toro is memorable too as her karate sensei who runs a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” Credit

A politically charged 162-minute film released when Americans have every reason to feel completely burned out by our country’s ongoing deterioration, One Battle After Another could have been a tone-deaf disaster and perhaps would have been had not Anderson remembered that being relevant needn’t come at the cost of being energetic and engaging