One Battle After Another Review: Paul Thomas Anderson Delivers The Year’s Unsurpassable Cinematic High

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest masterwork, One Battle After Another, had me levitating. It's like encountering something baggy yet perfectly crystallised, a hybrid work shifting seamlessly from broad humor to moronic intensity to the darkest crevasses of America's rotten insides. Loosely borrowing from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, Anderson sees eye-to eye with America’s unashamed white narcissism, slicing through the military and administrative might underpinning it while blowing it from within. In this film, crises don’t end but neither do generosities, proposing a hopeful pushback against anti-immigration and empty, ethno-fascist structures. This extraordinary film flies by, light on its feet and with pummeling vigor accenting every fiber of its political reality.

Splashed with supple skill to envy in every frame and cut, One Battle After Another roars forth with wild abandon. Despite a classically leaning rhythm and register, Anderson guides the film with the spirit of Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia, even after she's gone. Throwing caution to the winds, Perfidia storms the film open with the heat and jolt of a protagonist. A de facto leader of a guerilla outfit called the French 75, she oversees many bombings and break-ins at American centres of power with demolitions expert Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio). Even as they become a couple, some whisper of their match being odd. Her parents tell him he’s a stump, whereas she a runner. Perfidia isn’t one to be circumscribed by motherhood. She accuses Bob of tying her down with his male ego, while she stomps out for another mission, heedless to his reminders that they now have a child. But when things go south for her, the entire French 75 lands in trouble. “Every revolution starts with fighting demons, but fuckers end up fighting among themselves”, she sighs, though her incendiary impulses aren’t wiped out. Bob escapes with his daughter elsewhere, remaking identities.

Sixteen years pass, but the past insists with its unfinished business in the form of Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), with whom Perfidia has several run-ins, from the defiant to sexually dominating to submission. To unravel this relationship further would be to parcel out the endlessly shifting power rearrangements Anderson orchestrates. Race is key to the kernel the film ignites, yanking out how a nation casually and systemically imposes on and cuts out its most vulnerable people. For all his military stints, Lockjaw’s real yearning is after gaining membership of the exclusive Christmas Adventurers Club, a cabal of white fascists with clear political and arms backing. But the shadow of Lockjaw’s dalliance with Perfidia grows to sully what he otherwise thinks are due, long-pending rewards. What further complicates is the question of Bob and Perfidia’s daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti, making every glance shoot with blazing conviction), who has more than inherited her mother’s easy ferocity. Danger is couched in the stakes the father-daughter relationship gather. As Willa’s karate instructor Sergio, the effortlessly scene-stealing Benicio del Toro becomes a savior for the father as well.

Anderson takes direct aim at America's vicious politics and its radical corrective. Spilling from the inner sanctum of white supremacists to the furor on streets, the action is brash, often dipped in farcical humor. The filmmaking is so fluid and energetic One Battle After Another is never frayed despite steady action. Andy Jurgensen’s edit fuels the film with kinetic, undimmable force. In the stillest of moments, you can notice doom shaping up at arm’s length.

Staggering through in a bedraggled jumpy drug-addled daze, DiCaprio keeps the laughs going. Flapping about in a robe, he's a hoot in his increasingly angsty bewilderment at spitballing circumstances. But Anderson’s gaze isn’t one to reduce him. Amidst the spectacular mess Bob seems permanently mired in, there’s a vein of tender tragedy. In one of the film’s uproariously funny scenes, he rails at a comrade for not sharing urgent information that would ensure his daughter’s safety for the sake of a bureaucratic nitty-gritty. Exasperated, he vents how the comrade could even call himself a revolutionary. But how much of a radical is he himself?

There's disillusionment and resignation that have seeped in. Shorn of Perfidia and eroded by time’s heavy losses, including those of his closest comrades, he’s long been washed-up, barely keeping himself together through unsparing paranoia. But his wastrel impulses haven’t touched his fatherhood even a speck. This devotion emotionally binds the film.

Clocking in close to three hours, not a single second is wasted in this film that wears ambition with no scruples. The set-pieces, regular camera movements meld into a sumptuous symphony that never loosens or lets up. All of these could have easily fallen apart. These characters reveal their unwieldy flaws in richly complex ways. It’s a heady cocktail of politics and vulnerability, often manifest in Penn’s expertly calibrated performance, where you glimpse needy vulnerability behind the implacable, brittle exterior.

The whole thing is too big and bold to stay in place, but Anderson remains crisply sure, holding the many threads with tight elegance. Jonny Greenwood’s score pounds the breakneck unpredictability at play, while One Battle After Another builds up to a one-for-the-ages car chase scene. Darting through rolling California desert roads, Michael Bauman’s camerawork hits a vertiginous peak. Pulling off mirage-like effects, you’d likely be left clutching onto your seat. Yet, for all its exultations, One Battle After Another cleaves in a weariness of the old guard even as it paves the road and passes the baton to the next generation. Whittle through the rollicking chaos, and you’ll find a deep well of wisdom, thrashing through the left-right divide. All the in-between infusions gloriously come alive in this impassioned opus.