LEONARDO DICAPRIO IN ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (2025)
TRAILER
NYFF Q&A
A serious comedy of love and fury in a world out of whack
Paul Thomas Anderson's spectacularly accomplished and propulsive film is about dispersed Sixties-style radicals and racist right wingers and their attraction and repulsion towards each other. It is also about childrearing, and family love. Well, hell, it's about a lot of things, some of them totally relevant today, and individual audience members will determine what it's most about for now and for themselves. After seeing the film late enough for the fiercely loyal critical response to be clear, but seeing also how the political material could be polarizing, one has to wonder how this opening weekend will go and whether One Battle After Another will have legs and if it will prove as big a success with the public as it is with the savants, thereby paving the way for major accolades at awards time.
This is a beautifully made and wonderfully acted film shot in Vista Vision, a classic format, on 35 (and 70) mm. film but in a contemporary style with a lot of closeups and rough, kinetic handheld footage and lots of faces seen intimately. It's almost continual action, which can be bad, but Anderson handles it so well the long runtime is hardly noticeable if you're really paying attention.
The film is adapted from, or rather "inspired by," a novel by Thomas Pynchon. You can hear the rarely heard voice of Pynchon advertising his novel Inherent Vice here. That was the first Pynchon novel adapted by PT Anderson (in 2014; see my review of it). This is the second, out of his ten films, to be a Pynchon adaptation, so I guess we can say PTA is a pretty big fan of this writer.
Interestingly, a new novel by Pynchon, Shadow Ticket, probably his last, given that he is now 88, is scheduled to appear on October 7th. This film is "inspired by" the third of Pynchon's nine published novels, Vineland, published in 1990. This said, I'm not a Pynchon fan and have read nothing by him. But we can find out a bit about him on the internet: he has fans there. They seem to think Vineland is a lesser novel than Inherent Vice, a generally lightweight and accessible one, maybe one we average folk can love more.
In a positive review of Vineland in the NYTimes when it came out in 1990 by none other than Salmon Rushdie he described it as "that rarest of birds: a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years." He goes on to describe its tone: "as Thomas Pynchon turns his attention to the nightmares of the present rather than the past, his touch becomes lighter, funnier, more deadly." More encouragingly, Rushdie emphasizes in the book "that aforementioned hint of redemption, because this time entropy is not the only counterweight to power; community, it is suggested, might be another, and individuality, and family."
The complicated plot of Vineland isn't carried over to Anderson's One Battle After Another the way Pynchon's Inherent Vice's was to his same-titled film, but those themes are here, and also the element of a right winger (Sean Penn's semi-comical Col. Steven J. Lockjaw) and Teyana Taylor's scarily intense and sexy female revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills being attracted, Perfidia's turning informer, then eventually, indifferent to motherhood, disappearing from witness protection and not seen again.
Vineland is full of flashbacks; the movie isn't. The movie begins instead sixteen years ago with an impressive highly organized raid by radicals on an ICE detention center and freeing of the detainees. After Perfidia disappears, Pat, aka Ghetto Pat, aka Rocket Man, Leonardo DiCaprio's wonderful disheveled revolutionary character, in drunken and stoner retirement now known as Bob Ferguson, raises up Perfidia's baby daughter Charlene, now called Willa (strong newcomer Chase Infiniti). Then Col. Lockjaw returns with mercenaries to raid the Pacific Northwest sanctuary town of Baktan Cro where Bob and Willa live.
DiCaprio's Bob is one of the richest and most engaging movie characters in years; he's been compared to "The Dude" in The Big Lebowski as has his Pynchon source character. As a radical explosives expert he was bold and intense, a daredevil driver, yet considered a bit of a washout to radical purists. Now he is spectacularly, almost comically paranoid - but of course he has every right to be. Willa just doesn't know that, because the heyday of Bob and Perfidia's radical group the French 75 and the counter-ICE raid of the opening scene all happened before Willa was around. When Co. Lockjaw's henchmen come, French 75 allies are on the job to rescue Willa, but then Bob goes in search of her.
Benicio Del Toro makes an especially suave and soothing presence here as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, known to all simply as "Sensei," who is Willa's karate instructor but also a key figure in a local system to hide and protect undocumented people. Penn, DiCaprio and Del Toro all bounce Anderson's serious satirical comedy off each other.
Bob is furious - this is a running joke - because on the phone the French 75 operative, evidently someone young and new and a stickler for the rules, won't tell him where Willa has been taken because he can't remember the end of the series of passwords, "What time is it?" Do any of us know what time it is? Is it too late? Bob's worn down by so many years of getting wasted all day, he's weakened. And fleeing behind three youngsters, he does well, till he falls.
But after one of the most memorable of many memorable sequences, a car chase over rolling hills that roll so deep you can't see over the horizon or behind you, there is, for family, a happy ending. For Col. Lockjaw, there is a comeuppance so quietly chilling it virtually slithers by us. Some of Bob's fury is everyone's frustration with all that anyone over thirty struggles with about the changing world, from which button tap works the smartphone flash to the secret phrase that will save one's daughter.
There is very much to cherish and ponder in this, one of PTA's best films, more conventionally audience-pleasing than either the complicated Inherent Vice or the ho-hum Licorice Pizza. This one crosses swords with more conventional blockbusters here but by doing so it shows how utterly different and individual it is compared to them. Dr. Strangelove has been mentioned. In Col. Lockjaw you may see a shakier version of Kubrick's Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket. Anderson may not be taking so clear a stand as Kubrick did. But ask yourself: are we meant to despise the French 75 for raiding that detention center?
My feelings as so often lately are mixed about Jonny Greenwood's very up-to-date style and confident score. Its pulsating intensity is essential to the rhythm and focus, it works brilliantly to link the fast edits, but when music drowns out dialogue it has stepped out of line. Can you make a thriller that's silent? Yes, you can. Watch the 35-minute jewelry store burglary sequence (sample) in Jules Dassin's Rififi and see what pure focus on an action can be like.
One Battle After Another, 161 mins., opened in US theaters Sept. 26, 2025. Metacritic rating: 95%.
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