A first viewing of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” mainly sets up the pleasure of seeing it again. The movie, which runs two hours and forty-one minutes, is stuffed with fast-moving, complicated action and intricate dialogue, and the editing intercuts quickly among its teeming array of places, events, and characters. The first time I saw it, I found myself struggling to keep up with what was going on—but that feeling of being behind was intensified by a lack of psychological grasp, a sense that the characters were being put into motion because the script called for it rather than because of any dramatic logic or internal urgency. On second viewing, I stopped worrying: knowing what was going to happen, I savored the details all the more. The way that the story moves along proved as exciting as the story itself, the twists and turns of behavior as thrilling as those of plot. The sense of arbitrariness that had previously bewildered and frustrated me was drowned out by excitement and sheer aesthetic pleasure.
Anderson, who both wrote and directed the film, suppresses psychological complexity, creating characters who are little more than abstractions. The result is a film that, despite all its intensely realistic and viscerally physical action, is a work of grand symbolic design. The movie is strangely, unusually dialectical within itself—composed of many layers that don’t coalesce or connect but reflect off one another and generate tension. Through all these inconsistencies, absences, dissonances, and contradictions, an overarching coherence emerges.
Were the subject banal or frivolous, the approach would offer no more than one caper after another. But this is a story of high political stakes. Set in an alternate version of the United States, it involves leftist revolutionaries, the government’s largely successful efforts to take them down, and the long aftermath—both intimate and societal—of the rebellion. At times, Anderson trivializes the righteous ardor that goes into active, violent resistance, but there is nothing trivial in his portrait of shattered lives and relationships and of an American society shaken to its core. Furthermore, in dramatizing the mighty lurches of his imagined history, including of its alternative present day, he looks profoundly beyond the immediate terms of his fiction to reach powerful insights regarding the horrors of the moment. The film depicts the radical derangements of power, and the kinds of enlightenment that may hold out hope (however sentimental that notion may be), even if somewhere in the distance.
“One Battle After Another” cold-opens with two revolutionaries—Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), who’s nicknamed Ghetto Pat and Rocket Man—joining members of their dissident group, the French 75, for an armed raid on an immigration detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border. While managing to release about half the detainees, the group also advertises its presence and its intentions: this turns out to be just the first in a series of attacks. The French 75 blows up a campaign office of a senator who voted for an abortion ban; it blows up a bank; it blows up a transmission tower. (Anderson shows, with an impersonal sense of wonder, the lights going out all across the city it serves.) Its revolution is also sexual, or sexualized: when Perfidia bursts into the tent of the detention center’s commanding officer, Captain Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), she orders him to give himself an erection, and, with that tentpole in view beneath his pajamas, marches him out. In the car on the way back from the raid, Perfidia and Pat make out; while Pat is teaching Perfidia the fine points of bomb-making, she straddles him and initiates sex; as they dash away from the transmission tower where they’ve planted explosives, she wants them to have sex in the wild just before it blows up. Wielding an automatic weapon for target practice, she tells a female comrade, “Pussy ain’t for fun. This is the fun. The guns is the fucking fun.”
The sex is also racialized: early in the film Perfidia, who’s Black, asks Pat, who’s white, if he likes Black women. When she orders Lockjaw, also white, to get himself erect, he’s just called her “sweet thang.” And, in a critical moment, Lockjaw captures Perfidia but promises to let her go if she’ll meet him in a motel room. She goes through with it, keeping the tryst secret from Pat, and becomes pregnant, not knowing which man is the father. She and Pat name the baby, a girl, Charlene, and Pat ends up bringing her up alone, after Perfidia gets caught, informs on the group, and enters witness protection. Pat and Charlene are given false identities and go on the run. Sixteen years later, they’re living together in a sanctuary city called Baktan Cross; Charlene, now called Willa (and played by an extraordinary young actress named Chase Infiniti), is in high school, and Pat, now called Bob, is doing nothing but drugs and drinking and hanging out. Suddenly, Lockjaw, now a colonel, is motivated to capture Willa and hunt down Bob, and the rest of the film involves the motives for his pursuit, the efforts of Bob and Willa to evade capture, their resulting separation, and their daring struggle to reunite.
One of the best aspects of classic movies of radical action at a time when it was actually happening—such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” and Robert Kramer’s “Ice”—is debate. What it takes, both ideologically and practically, to organize a group that undertakes violent action is fascinating, because it’s inseparable from the underlying energy that gives the drama its emotional charge—the transformation of passion into action. There’s nothing of the sort in “One Battle After Another.” Factionalism, doctrine, ground rules, justifications are, in Anderson’s film, irrelevant, meaning that the French 75’s actions take place in an intellectual void. Revolution comes off as a given rather than as an achievement, closer to a club than to an army. The political situation that Anderson illustrates, in the earlier events of the movie, is essentially one of vibes. Yet the movie’s vibes aren’t entirely trivial, because they resonate agonizingly closely with the current mood. Despite the lack of political specifics, the analogies are unambiguous: Anderson depicts police and military combining to hold nonwhite people in what are effectively concentration camps, and a repressive and normative authority allows an official to gratify his kink by abusing power.
While watching the first part of “One Battle After Another,” I was reminded of a scene from another great film about leftist radicals and their plans for revolutionary violence: Jean-Luc Godard’s “La Chinoise.” There, a woman named Véronique (Anne Wiazemsky), a member of a Paris-based cell, happens to meet a philosophy professor (the real-life philosopher Francis Jeanson, playing himself). She tells him of her group’s plans to shut down their university with bombs; he tells her that she and her cohort will be caught long before they manage to do it. She reminds him that, during the Algerian War, he had been pursued by the police—Jeanson did indeed work with pro-Algerian activists in France—and managed to get away. Jeanson explains, “Because there were many sympathizers among the French population. Because even those not quite in favor of Algerian independence didn’t denounce us.” He goes on: “Your action will lead to nothing if it can’t be taken up by a community, by a class.”
That debate, and those lines, illustrate what’s at stake in the sixteen-year gap between the two parts of “One Battle After Another.” If there’s an element of mockery in the early depiction of the French 75 and its campaign of violence, it’s rooted in the idea of the vanguard that, far from rooted in a community, plans to make a revolution on its own and presumes to lead society into drastic changes that don’t have anything like consensus behind them—and by way of tactics that have even less support or sympathy.
Very little has changed, a voice-over says, in the sixteen years between the scattering of the French 75 and Bob and Willa’s confrontation with military violence in Baktan Cross. The voice-over is both truthful and ironic. Certainly, some things haven’t changed: relentless government persecution of immigrants; the Army working closely with heavily militarized police and, under Lockjaw’s command, still mounting violent raids; the U.S. still essentially under hostile occupation by its own government, a country under siege from within. But other things have changed. In Baktan Cross, there is an organized resistance that is deeply rooted in the community. Its leader, a martial-arts teacher, sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), has what he calls “a little Latino Harriet Tubman situation going on at my place.” When combat forces come for immigrants, there are organized protests and also an elaborately planned escape operation. (This sense of informal consensus contrasts with a fascinating and emblematic aspect of the movie: the absence of electoral politics. There are no parties, no campaigns, no speeches from Presidents or other officials, no clear connection between the machinery, however misused, of democracy and the woeful state of the nation.)
The rootedness of resistance takes other forms, too, exemplified in the French 75, which, even sixteen years on, still exists in some way. One member from the old days (Paul Grimstad) now runs a guerrilla radio station, and, when he’s kidnapped, local residents notice and take action on the broadcaster’s behalf. The group itself seems to have become more of a rescue organization than a band of warriors: the effort to protect Willa from Lockjaw is led by another old-school member named Deandra (Regina Hall), and there’s a large compound of well-armed activists who, to all appearances, are running another form of sanctuary. They have found a way to connect with the sympathies of the community and, thereby, to earn help and support.
One of the finest scenes in the movie shows Bob, after an arrest, receiving covert help from several unlikely sources: a few leading questions, a nod or shake of the head, a word to the wise, some bold behind-the-scenes communications, and he’s sprung. The scene exemplifies the rarefied aestheticism with which Anderson brings the turbulent and grand-scale drama to the screen. If modern cinema is defined by the abstract relations between a story and its telling, the height of classicism consists of concrete relations rendered in style. Anderson exhibits a classicism that is both intensely self-aware and able to draw immense power from a startling phrase or gesture, an inventively composed shot, even an eye-catching prop or article of clothing. “One Battle After Another” is a great action film—not solely because of its taut suspense, its visceral thrills, and its strong rooting interest but, especially, because of the exuberant inventiveness with which details are deployed, moment to moment, to embody the story.
Anderson elicits memorable inflections of dialogue, intent glances, brazen thrashes of energy and outbursts of fury from his charismatic cast, making “One Battle After Another” a feast of inspired and dedicated acting. At the same time, some of the performances—especially Penn’s but, at times, even DiCaprio’s—veer toward satirical exaggeration. Anderson sets up his villains with an apt air of mockery, the unintended clownishness of ignorance and arrogance, even as his heroes, as flawed as they may be, are gilded with his gaze of admiration. Yet, strangely and dismayingly, because military and governmental trappings are so familiar from other movies and thus easily borrowed by this one, Lockjaw seems more firmly grounded in his political milieu than Pat/Bob and Perfidia do in theirs. As a result, “The Big Lebowski,” in its outlandish yet erudite comedy, is actually more revealing and moving in its portrait of disappointed idealism, of an ex-radical gone to seed, than Anderson’s film is.
For all the extraordinary richness of the sensory and dramatic texture of “One Battle After Another,” there’s no submerged iceberg of experience or knowledge below its majestic peak. Regardless of any ethical or historical import to the prominence of political debate and analysis in such movies as “La Chinoise” and “Zabriskie Point,” what matters is their documentary connection with experience. Both films were made contemporaneously with political action of the sorts they dramatize, and both films make documentary-like contact with real-life activists. They show the practical labor of revolution, whereas Anderson’s film emphasizes its emotional labor. In so doing, he makes a movie that’s both brilliant and hollow, an old-fashioned movie about the world of today (and maybe tomorrow), a vision of hopeful possibilities that remains unmoored from realities. Yet his film, even in its omissions, brims with strategic ingenuity and daring, cinematic and political—to fight other films’ empty fantasies with substantial ones, to battle other advocates’ pernicious myths with virtuous ones. ♦
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