One Battle After Another (2025)

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw One Battle After Another feels like contraband. It’s the sort of movie the Ministry of Culture would ban before offering the position of Head of the Ministry of Culture to its director. A Fritz Lang situation, if you will, where a nation-under-siege’s Best shoot their shot before being silenced or recruited–or they escape in the last crepuscular years before the curtain finally drops. It’s impolite. It’s outraged about what’s obviously outrageous and outspoken at a time when most everyone else is stunned into silence or cowed into surrender. It’s as sick of the bullshit as you are. A miracle, then. Or it feels like a miracle, anyway. Depending on how things go, we could eventually be talking about it the way we talk about Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. Do I exaggerate? If I do, it’s only by degrees. We are all in this pot together, and it’s hotter than you think. Not noticing has brought us to where we are: bright red and just south of parboiled. Do you notice? Paul Thomas Anderson does.

One Battle After Another is a war idyll. It feels like Children of Men would feel if it were written by John Milius–like the last terrible gasps of a dying animal, a corpulent beast mortally wounded, looking for a soft place to die. Not unlike Alex Garland’s Civil War, it’s more an epitaph for a certain kind of idealism than anything else, another updating of Medium Cool that doesn’t cross the line from fantasy to reality because there isn’t a line. Not anymore, there isn’t. Up is down. Discard the evidence of your eyes. It’s the final dictate of the State. “What will you do when you get older? Will you try to change it like I did? We failed,” says one of this film’s revolutionaries, and this is what goes through my head whenever the next generation asks what the fuck we were doing while the good guys saved banks instead of the working class; while we decided to keep our insufficient jobs performing degrading tasks instead of staging the general strike that could have finally influenced the people who were supposed to lead us rather than exploit us. I tell them I had dreams once, grandiose ones of standing up while others bent the knee. Now I see that all the knees of my pants are worn through.

Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an activist to some–and a terrorist to the State–who loves Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), even though their approaches, and indeed temperaments, aren’t quite dialled to the same intensity. They’re soldiers in a movement called “French 75.” If memory serves, Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, upon which this film is loosely based, referred to its resistance fighters as “24fps,” a nod perhaps to the cinematic qualities inherent in the text. I wonder if Anderson named his rebels after a cocktail the British invented during WWI because the drink is made from ingredients cobbled together under fire and underground.* One Battle After Another is a tonal adaptation more than a literal one, transplanting Pynchon’s Nixon/Reagan nightmare to Trump parts one and two, imagining a dystopian, authoritarian hellscape where an overmilitarized police force operates under the aegis of open warfare against “immigrants,” extralegal rendition, and open nativist white supremacy. All the things Vineland warned against, essentially, made manifest by the 35 years since its publication. The film is an adaptation of Vineland, in other words, in the sense that Anderson’s The Master is an adaptation of Gravity’s Rainbow. Spiritual.

Perfidia is captured by deranged jarhead Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who likes the way she humiliates him. (The unusually effective eroticism of Inherent Vice, based on another Pynchon work, dominates the first hour of One Battle After Another.) She gets pregnant–whether by Bob or Lockjaw, we’re not sure–and gives birth to baby Willa (Chase Infiniti as a 17-year-old), whereupon she disappears into witness protection…and then from it. Time passes. Willa is raised to be paranoid à la River Phoenix’s character in Sidney Lumet’s Running on Empty, and, the same way that film’s righteous counterculture warriors’ bill comes due, so, too, do the stormtroopers come knocking for Bob and Willa. Haggard, unshaven, filthy, and perpetually confused, Bob’s no one’s idea of a hero, just as Lockjaw, with his terrifying, scarecrow gait and Popeye physique, is a funhouse caricature of Penn’s own psychotic Sgt. Meserve from Casualties of War.

Much of the pleasure of One Battle After Another is rooted in the idea that there might be an entire network of sleeper operatives in the United States, waiting for a match to light a powderkeg of meaningful resistance. That there are people who’ve been through this once before and maybe have things to teach a new generation called to fight the same enemies, taken root now on domestic soil. The same impulse that founded this country, conjured again to save it. But it must be said that the mere craft of this VistaVision presentation is awe-inspiring from frame to frame. It’s an eyeblink at just over two and a half hours, and each minute seems better than the last. And it’s surprisingly dense with action that, for as chaotic as it gets, is never confusing thanks to the clarity of its orchestration–although the film’s technical perfection is bound to be obscured by how “accidental” it all feels. Look at the grace notes that could be treated as throwaways but which, by themselves, turn familiar sequences into immortal ones, like a small carpet rolling over a secret trapdoor, a brilliant forty-foot slapstick fall off a roof, or the Steely Dan and especially Tom Petty needledrops; pure delight.

Throughout One Battle After Another, as Bob tries to reunite with his daughter while both are on the run, I kept coming back to Melvyn Douglas’s speech in Hud about how the face of our country changes because of the men we admire. Is burned-out Bob our last best hope? It can’t be reanimated martinet Lockjaw, can it? I knew we were in trouble, yet this litany of symptoms diagnosing the terminal nature of our national disease is crystal clear and damning. I think, in the end, Anderson is giving us a woman to look up to instead. Her possible fathers are fucked-up beyond repair, but the future? Female. One Battle After Another is a celebration of the power we derive from our diversity, the indomitability of our spirit, and our essential rejection of authoritarianism, which was the driving force behind our revolution against a colonial monarchy and its mad king. It’s not a hagiography for Americans–who can, after all, be messy and violent–but for the idea of a country that used to do things besides try to turn a quick buck. The picture’s ending, like Vineland‘s, is upbeat. Even more upbeat than the book’s, arguably, because it ties a few additional threads and allows for a reunion that’s emotionally resonant. More than upbeat, it’s inspirational: a call to action, an invitation to the dance. Anderson says fighting fascism isn’t civil disobedience, it’s American. There is, in fact, nothing more American, so let’s go.

*Courtesy the great David J. Schow, “French 75” could also refer to a line from Lee Marvin’s character in The Professionals, giving instructions for destroying a water tower: “Like it was hit by a French 75. Blow it to hell and gone.”