Paul Thomas Anderson’s title seems to echo the famous quote about history, but it could also easily be applied to raising a child. It is fitting, then, that the main action of One Battle After Another involves the hunt for a missing child, since a large part of parenting has to do with the risk of your child’s endangerment, and the consequent hope that you have given them the tools necessary for their well-being in the event that endangerment does arise.
Broaden the scope of a single child to an entire generation, and you have one of the film’s primary concerns—anxieties, even—over which many of its characters incite conflict, and/or try to secure on their own often blinkered, and ridiculous, terms. Anderson’s camera (operated by Michael Bauman, on 35mm and using VistaVision cameras) even seems to operate like a helicopter parent, tracking its subjects constantly through the American proto-dystopia, as diligent on its targets whether they are walking down hallways or on car chases through heavy traffic. And the child in question, Willa Ferguson née Charlene Calhoun (Chase Infiniti in her big screen debut), is by turns idealized and diminished by her elders until she is finally given the opportunity to dictate her fate in the film’s climax.
Who are the generations in conflict? The elders are represented by a club of upper-class sclerotic white supremacists called The Christmas Adventurers Club, who are in semi-cahoots with the military industrial complex, personified in the uber-virile yet venereally tortured captain-turned-colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Then there is the slightly younger generation (Gen X to the racists’ Baby Boomers) headed by the French 75, a group of revolutionary terrorists modeled after the Weather Underground who rob banks, blow up post offices, and attack various government operations. The main players here are “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), the French 75’s explosives expert, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), the loose cannon of the group and Pat’s lover, and Deandra (Regina Hall), one of the crew’s more level-headed members.
The film’s prologue details Pat and Perfidia’s union during their run with the French 75, as well as their first encounter with Lockjaw at a migrant detention facility; Perfidia forces him to masturbate at gunpoint, which leads him to sadomasochistically obsess over her. There is a motel room tryst, later on, which is hidden from Pat’s knowledge despite his and Perfidia having a baby girl together, whom they name Charlene. Perfidia cows from the responsibility of motherhood, continuing with the French 75 and leaving Pat to raise Charlene on his own. She is eventually captured by Lockjaw, and in return for her own limited freedom, sells out the other members of the group, though Pat manages to escape with their child. Lockjaw is promoted for his efforts, but before he can finally have Perfidia for himself, she escapes house arrest and flees to Mexico.
The narrative begins proper after a fifteen year time-jump, with Pat and Charlene, under the aliases Bob and Willa Ferguson, living in the town of Baktan Cross (a fictional mashup of any number of so-called “sanctuary cities”). Bob has become lax with age and isolation and a strong weed addiction. Willa, now a bright teenager, has to both mother him and suffer his frequent paranoia, which has restricted her from having a cellphone, along with being forced to remember codewords and procedures lest the government ever come after them again. She still seems to have a healthy enough social life (palling around with a gaggle of colorful Gen Z types) and even practices karate at a dojo led by Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benecio Del Toro).
Enter again Lockjaw, who vies for membership into the Christmas Adventurers Club but must now purge any evidence of interracial coupling, as they seem to suspect his involvement with Perfidia, who is Black; he believes that Willa might be his daughter and eventually tracks their location to Baktan Cross with the help of an American Indian bounty hunter named Avanti (Eric Schweig). Lockjaw brings the might of the armed forces with him, and lays siege to Baktan Cross under the auspices of rounding up undocumented migrants. With the aid of Deandra, Willa escapes Lockjaw’s initial kidnapping attempt at her high school dance; as does Bob, who links up with St. Carlos as the sensei facilitates his own “Harriet Tubman’ scheme of whisking imperiled families to safety. These separate storylines diverge and dovetail as both Lockjaw and Bob pursue Willa for their own purposes, and as Willa gradually discovers—and reluctantly comes to terms with—the true nature of her parentage.
One Battle After Another is a rip-roar through the contemporary moment, full of its attendant ills and omens, that manages to just balance such attention with a madcap absurdist levity—and all the more impressive for its well-paced two hour and forty minute runtime. Drawing healthily from its Thomas Pynchon source material (the 1990 novel Vineland), one is immediately drawn into its near-allegorical nature through the very names of the characters: e.g. Perfidia, as in “treachery” or “betrayal”, and Lockjaw, which points to both the character’s unwavering nature as well as his inner toxicity (Doctor Strangelove‘s Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, who similarly fretted over the state of his “bodily fluids”, also comes to mind). But where allegory can be moralizing, and not very fun, One Battle After Another never takes itself too seriously to let its “themes” get in the way of its hijinks.
The film’s strength is three-pronged: Anderson’s directorial prowess, Andy Jurgensen’s momentum-forward editing, and the showcase of its acting talent, particularly for Penn, who steals the show with a clinic in warped military machismo, and the young Infiniti, who exhibits scrappy resolve with believable naiveté. Considering all the film’s moving parts and tones, everything hangs together quite well, though one must accept certain un-subtleties—like the too-apt names, a well-crafted but predictable climax, etc.—to be fully immersed in the story. Anderson’s dialogue too, apart from some moments of zany humor and revelatory snipes (Lockjaw’s biting farewell, in particular), is merely serviceable in order to get the wild plot rolling, one scene after another.
But they are good scenes, overall: St. Carlos calmly ferrying undocumented families to safety whilst managing Bob’s myopic freak-out is a highlight, and the film’s two main car chases are expertly (and practically!) sequenced, with the final one almost hypnotic with its lulling cuts. Bauman’s cinematography is frequently striking, deftly mobile but just as adept with static shots, when deep in the bowels of elitist suburbia or when beholding some of the gorgeous natural landscape of Borrego Springs.
Special attention must be paid to Jonny Greenwood’s scoring tour de force, a heady mix of bombast, propulsion, and reserve that both sticks out as attractive music and perfectly marries itself to the onscreen action without detracting from it. The title track, in particular, is a real winner.
Will One Battle After Another save cinema? Likely not, but luckily enough, movies don’t have to do that in order to be good. To echo many of the film’s champions, it is refreshing to go to the cinema and see something that isn’t rank IP-regurgitation; something that is clearly in homage to certain traditions (Pynchon paranoia, 70s grit-core, exploitation flicks, etc.) but just as clearly wise to current happenings. Young filmmakers, actually, would do well to check it out and learn from Anderson’s craft so that they—like Willa does, when her moment arises—can be ready to take matters into their own hands once the prior generation lets go of the wheel.
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