Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is always challenging himself to do something different, for better and worse. In his early films he was accused of watching and internalizing too much Robert Altman, as if that’s some unforgivable sin, but he kept expanding his scope and broadening his ambitions. He’s made Great American Epics™ about oil men and religious icons, he’s made intimate marriage dramas about the fashion industry and poison mushrooms. He dissected Adam Sandler’s “Saturday Night Live” personality and reassembled it in an arthouse universe. And he made that one film romanticizing a disturbingly unhealthy relationship between an adult woman and a teenager, for reasons which boggle the mind.
“One Battle After Another” is the latest Paul Thomas Anderson film to go off in wild directions. With nearly three hours of real estate to explore, he really gets around. The film dramatizes a revolutionary movement within the contemporary United States, with noble intentions towards liberating persecuted persons in right wing concentration camps. It also accuses the Black woman leading that movement of hypocrisy and sexual assault. It’s a stoner movie about an ex-freedom fighter trying to save his daughter amidst a marijuana-addled haze. It’s also a freedom fighting movie in which the true heroes risk the lives of innocent people just to save that one stoner guy a bunch of times.
Perhaps if “One Battle After Another” were more focused, or just shorter, Anderson’s message could have been clearer. Instead he’s let himself starfish all over a giant kingsize bed, which would be fine if the space was entirely his. But he invited the rest of us to his slumber party and after a while he makes us feel unwelcome.
“One Battle After Another” stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a man with a lot of names, but we’ll just stick with Bob. He’s the explosives expert for a revolutionary group called The French 75, led by his girlfriend Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Perfidia is a charismatic figurehead and an insatiable sex addict, which to Anderson makes her dangerously irresponsible. Worse, she’s also a sex criminal who forces the right wing Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to pleasure himself at gunpoint during a raid.
Col. Lockjaw was, it seems, sexually repressed, which in Anderson’s film means his sexual assault was just an awakening. Lockjaw hunts Perfidia down but instead of bringing her to justice, he begins a torrid affair where she continues to dominate him. Eventually Perfidia has a child, possibly Bob’s and possibly Lockjaw’s, and finally goes over the line and jeopardizes the French 75. Bob escapes with their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), and they go into hiding for years.
That’s when the plot actually kicks in, God knows how many minutes into this cinematic sprawl.
It turns out Lockjaw is on the wait list to join a secret white supremacist cabal, but they won’t let him in if he has a half-Black daughter, so he uses all the powers at ICE’s disposal to hunt her down. Pretty soon Willa is fleeing for her life and Bob, who spent more than a decade dissolving his brain cells, can’t remember where the safe house was supposed to be, so he runs every which way trying to find her. Riots break out. Pandemonium in the streets. Paul Thomas Anderson seems to think it’s all very funny, which I’m not entirely sure I agree with.
Leonardo DiCaprio spends the majority of “One Battle After Another” staggering through the chaos wearing a bathrobe and barely making sense, as though Jeff Lebowski accidentally wandered into “The Battle of Algiers.” But in “The Big Lebowski,” the misplaced Dude was an everyman observer haplessly roped into someone else’s story, applying stoner logic to the cynical world of rich and corrupt men. Bob isn’t visiting a strange world, he’s returning to it, and yet every time he’s on screen he’s a distraction from the worldly affairs, and the worldly affairs frequently have to stop and make space for him. You’d think that would be fodder for social criticism, perhaps interrogating the space white men insist on taking up in other people’s battles, but Anderson mostly treats Bob like he’s just comic relief.
It’s not that Paul Thomas Anderson lets the film’s politics fade into the background. The film is filled with right wing corruption and farcical portrayals of a secret racist illuminati. But he’s more interested in taking cheap potshots at the film’s real-world analogues than actually exploring them, and when he does add complexity, that complexity has an annoying “both sides are bad” quality. He couldn’t portray an antifascist organization without undermining them with accusations of insincerity and sexual misconduct. He couldn’t portray the film’s one prominent queer character without making them the one person willing to violate the sanctity of “Shut the F–k Up Friday.”
Anderson does commit to portraying White Nationalists as insipid hypocrites who abuse their power, but he also insists on giving them the last word, for some reason, tacking on scenes that add little to the film’s finale. In all, it’s a confused picture, perhaps suggesting that America’s political struggles stem from a lack of consistent identity or ideals. Or perhaps it suggests that weekend political warriors are an annoying distraction from real heroes doing real work, like Benicio Del Toro’s karate instructor-slash-underground leader. But the fact that Del Toro’s character genuinely views Bob as the most important person in the room, when clearly he’s not, suggests Anderson isn’t entirely confident about that either.
As with all things Anderson, “One Battle After Another” is an ambitious production. Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman do an astounding job of finding epic shots hidden within comedic landscapes, and vice-versa, and the cast is uniformly equipped to tackle this material, as inconsistent as it is. It’s sometimes a farce, sometimes a tragedy, and not every character seems aware of that push and pull. Penn’s villain is Dick Dastardly with a Nazi fetish and unexplored sexual kinks, and yet neither Hanna nor Barbera seem to have factored into the creation of any of the other characters.
It’s possible, maybe even likely, that Paul Thomas Anderson has stuffed so much into one movie that a lot people will find something to take away from it. All I see is the lack of focus. It’s an energetic picture a lot of the time, but it’s not cohesive, not even within its themes. Perhaps Anderson is too talented, now, to make a film that can’t be accused of greatness, even when it’s far from his greatest work.
“One Battle After Another” opens exclusively in theaters on Sept. 26.