In 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson adapted Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice for the big screen; 11 years later he has now released another Pynchon screen adaptation, One Battle After Another, based on the novel Vineland. Both films involve characters taking a hell of a lot of drugs. There are a lot more similarities between the two films to list, but this was not a point of endless comparison, rather a point of introductory interest. PTA has always been an eclectic filmmaker despite having a definite auteur style and thematic interests (found families, the driving factors of power and ambition, and critiques of American culture, to name a few), and here he is adding a new addition to expand this diverse repertoire by making a surprisingly mainstream film about a group of scattered radical revolutionaries. The 21st-century setting is somewhat rare for PTA and helps give this a prominent political edge as a representation of the absurdities of various corners of American society, merging elements of his films The Master, There Will Be Blood, and Liquorice Pizza, even the awkward comedy of Punch-Drunk Love, and, as mentioned before, Inherent Vice to create one of PTA’s most accessible yet confrontational and possibly dividing films, despite the fact that MAGA, Antifa, or ICE are never explicitly named in the film.
Leonardo DiCaprio is finally given his chance to work with PTA after turning down the main role in Boogie Nights, which of course went to Mark Wahlberg. He plays a now perpetually stoned revolutionary in hiding with his teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti). Her mother (Teyana Taylor) is also a revolutionary, placed in witness protection (and eventually disappearing into the aether) after she sold out the rest of their radical group, the ‘French 75’ (named after the cocktail?). Also in the mix is Benicio Del Toro as a martial arts sensei harbouring an undocumented community around the city from this film’s equivalent of ICE agents, Regina Hall as Deandra, a current revolutionary who serves mostly as a plot device to get other characters from A to B, and finally Sean Penn as Col. Lockjaw, an abhorrently racist and misogynistic military man type who consistently abuses his power, enjoys racial sexual humiliation, and spends a large part of the film trying to join a far-right white supremacist group. Penn steals the show in an impressive performance of terrifying toxic masculinity mixed with a seedy nature and grating voice obviously inspired by RFK Jr. If that sounds like a lot – that’s because it is. But the film doesn’t make the mistake of trying to juggle all of this and more at once; it moves at an electric pace where you have little time to process what happened in the scene before, and characters tend to come in and out of this film, with many minor characters appearing in just one or two scenes but acting integrally to the plot, but this isn’t a bad thing at all and in fact helps to immerse the audience in the hectic lives of characters living in seemingly constant flux and action. Through this emphasis on the continuum of the plot, the audience will cultivate their understanding of details and themes, spurred on immediately by the obvious political parallels of real life, throughout the film, rather than being given the chance to dwell on each scene individually. The absurdity is certainly that – absurd – but it certainly doesn’t feel out of place in relation to the crazy couple of weeks in US politics and global affairs and rarely – if ever – relies on coincidence to further the narrative over motivation and reasonable (if often unrelatable) explanations. In that way it reminds me somewhat of a Coen Brothers film. To refer to the title of the film always feels a little tacky and obvious, but the title in itself, One Battle After Another, truly demonstrates how the film is not only influenced by current American politics, but we can see it as a moment in a long-running, continuous and evolving global conflict between revolution and systematic power and ultra-conservatism, often in the form of political oppression; DiCaprio’s character sits smoking weed and watching Battle of the Algiers, the evolutions of revolutions, man!
MORTFILMS 