One Battle After Another

Grade: B

I wish I could recommend One Battle After Another more than I am. It feels like the kind of movie that many critics will put on their top ten list to be cool, and to be on the bandwagon. I’m sorry to miss that ride, but there’s only so much Kool-Aid I can drink. It is extremely ambitious, bombastic, ballsy, audacious, and has Oscar written all over it. You will be hearing about it for months to come, like Conclave last year, or Killers of the Flower Moon from the year before. Like those two, One Battle After Another will not make my top ten list – but it has amazing, excellent moments, beats, and scenes, and a couple of performances that I would nominate for Oscars.

This is a Paul Thomas Anderson movie through and through. It is lengthy and at times meandering, like his Licorice Pizza. It dips its toe into the avant garde pool like The Master. He likes to cut around to various points of view experiencing the same moment (here’s what’s happening over here, here’s what’s happening over here, and meanwhile, here’s what’s happening over here) – a convention he utilized in Magnolia and Boogie Nights. At the beginning, we meet Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor as, respectively, Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills – members of a revolutionary group known as the French 75. They go around freeing immigrant detainees in California. They butt heads with Captain Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a sadistic white supremacist. Pat and Perfidia have a baby girl together, they go into a witness protection program of sorts, Perfidia disappears to Mexico, and this is just the prologue.

Cut to 16 years later. The daughter, known as Willa (post witness protection), is a teenager, and played by Chase Infiniti, in her feature film debut. DiCaprio is doing the single dad thing, often drunk or high. He is very funny in scenes such as when he’s trying to use the correct pronouns and terminology around Willa and her friends, or when he finds himself back in the game, and gets frustrated on the phone because he can’t remember some of the secret passcode phrases to get to the next level. 30 years ago, he was the heartthrob of many. Now, at 50, it’s a hoot to see him play the awkward bumbling dad.

All this time, Lockjaw hasn’t forgotten about DiCaprio and his family. He’s harbored an Inspector Javert-like obsession with them. I won’t say exactly how he comes back into play, but this is Sean Penn’s best performance in years. His usual sliminess is just what the doctor ordered here, and we see his struggle as he gets to have levels and layers. He is being considered for induction into a “racial purifiers” group, and really wants to get in, but he has a secret that might be a deterrent. Benicio Del Toro puts in a fun performance as a karate instructor/sensei who has a surprising amount of experience/ability to help when things go south for DiCaprio and his daughter. Alana Haim, so great in Licorice Pizza, has a small role here. I wish there was more of her in this, but the screenplay puts an early end to her involvement. It’s all very interesting, for the most part, to see how everything plays out.

The title is absolutely appropriate, as it’s one situation and plot point after another. The movie doesn’t sustain the entertainment for all 161 of its minutes. The average roller coaster ride lasts 2 minutes. Imagine a 10-minute one, with some periods of slow, straight, uneventful riding in between the fast, thrilling drops. One Battle After Another stops and starts and stops and starts. Speaking of roller coasters, it feels like we’re on one in a wonderful late chase scene on a hilly desert road. We experience much of it from the point of view of the front bumper. The score is interesting. Each piece seems to be based off a certain kind of chord or scale. One plays around with open fifths, one uses the whole note scale, and another has lots of flatted seconds and sixths, which makes everything sound Middle Eastern. I am very eager to see the reactions and discussions it will generate. I do want to see it again, and maybe I’m a rewatch or two from liking it more, but these reviews are about my immediate first impression.

DiCaprio’s appearance here reminded me of the summer of 2019, which saw the releases of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars album. Both evoke the sights, sounds, and feelings of California in 1969. There are songs on Western Stars about a Hollywood actor and a reckless stunt man – both of which feature heavily in OUATIH’s plot. This symmetry wasn’t lost on hardcore Springsteen fans, who lit up the message boards with discussion about it. 

I’m going to make an esoteric connection that I don’t think you’ll read anywhere else. Three months ago, we got a box set of seven lost Springsteen albums, going back to 1983. There’s one called Inyo, recorded in the second half of the 1990s, which is thematically centered on border/immigration stories. And now we have the revolution-centric One Battle After Another. I don’t love Inyo, but I like it. It’s creative, a unique kind of lovely, but I need to be in a certain mood and zone to appreciate it. One Battle After Another hit me the same way.

Grade: B