Will Audiences Fight for This Relentless Battle?

The revolution will not be televised — it’ll be projected on IMAX screens across the country (and, if you’re lucky, in VistaVision). Paul Thomas Anderson throws a cinematic Molotov cocktail into multiplexes with the pulse-pounding thriller One Battle After Another, a ferocious howl of rage against imperial states, fascist regimes, racial purity tests, immigration crackdowns, white supremacists, and the domestic use of military force. But it also chronicles the supreme sacrifices of sustaining a revolutionary life, and of committing to underground vigilantism as an ongoing act of defiance: relentless, exhausting, corrosive, traumatic, perpetual; and, in its innate struggle for freedom, fundamentally inspiring.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Written by: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti
Running time:  162 mins

Best of all, this tug of war between oppressors and resistors is a white-knuckle ride, a Weather Underground-inflected rallying cry with all the propulsive energy of a Mad Max movie. The film was inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel (Vineland), but it plays like a Tony Scott popcorn picture. Imagine Inherent Vice crossed with Enemy of the State, with machines guns and detonation devices, high-speed chases and riots in the streets. Is this the same PTA who made Boogie Nights and Licorice Pizza? In the words of zen radical and Ninja Academy sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro): “That’s heavy metal, bro.”

The film’s center of gravity is Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), aka the Gringo Zapata, aka Rocket Man, a munitions expert whose hardcore radical girlfriend Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) gets so turned on by their explosive acts together — blowing up courthouses, blasting grid system power lines — that most conflagrations preface lusty kisses and slow grinds.

She even uses her sexuality to disorient ramrod-straight army commander Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who willingly obliges when, during a surprise liberation raid on the Otay Mesa Immigration Detention Center, she orders him to “keep that dick up” and humiliate himself with a pitched tent in his pants and zip-ties around his wrists. She becomes Lockjaw’s obsession, and not just for her radical acts of domestic terror with vigilante group the French 75. Soon enough the two are having secret motel assignations to the tune of the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy,” where Lockjaw seems more than happy to submit to her absolute authority.

“I. Declare war. Motherfucker,” barks Perfidia, who complicates the French 75’s radical agenda with a swollen pregnant belly alongside her AR-15. She gets rattled when her radical boyfriend turns domestic. “We’re a family now,” says Ghetto Pat. And when one of their bank robberies goes sideways, the French 75 members scatter, going deep undercover. Perfidia disappears completely, and Pat and his newborn baby become Bob and Willa Ferguson. Time passes, Willa (now Chase Infiniti) becomes a straight-A teenager, and the radical single dad now named Bob has traded violent uprisings for a quiet but semi-paranoid life as a cross-eyed heavy drinking stoner. Extremism has only gotten worse, racism more intense, tensions even higher. And a break in the search for the French 75 puts Lockjaw on their trail again. “Sixteen years later, the world had changed very little,” we’re told in voiceover.

Anderson has always been revolutionary in his filmmaking techniques, but he’s never addressed politics so overtly. He’s also focused most of his attention on the past, telling period pieces that comment obliquely on timeless issues. The last time he used a contemporary canvas on an epic scale was for 1999’s Magnolia — his operatic study of interior lives. With its condemnation of here-and-now government policies, including the current administration’s virulent strain of racism masquerading as anti-woke backlash, One Battle After Another is his most radical act, and (as the father of mixed-race children) his most immediately personal.

But don’t expect a dogmatic harangue. Anderson’s film still bears his trademark blend of sincerity and satire, a heady dose of reality laced with anarchic absurdism. (Who else but a prankster would play Gil Scott-Heron as the hold music for a revolutionary hotline?) More impressively, the film damns both side of the extremist coin — like any zealotry, neofascism and anarchism inevitably become self-destructive and self-defeating.

For most of its characters, the film is a deeply sad tragedy, from the secretly radical Sisters of the Brave Beaver in the Chupacabra Hills to the stiff-spined, small-minded, hypocritical obsessives of the masonic Christmas Adventurer’s Club, self-described “Superior Men” who want to eliminate all the half-breeds and any others they see as punk trash. One side yells “Viva la revolución!” while the other chants “Hail St. Nick!” Both are shouting, but neither side is listening.

The beloved SoCal auteur hasn’t suddenly become a 21^st-century Gillo Pontecorvo (there’s even a sly dig at the Italian agitprop director when Bob gets high watching The Battle of Algiers). Anderson isn’t here to glamorize political violence, or romanticize the radical left. He remains, at his core, the same filmmaker behind all of his brilliantly eccentric movies: a strident humanist. One Battle After Another is, fundamentally, a struggle between love and hate, between those who want to control others and those who want the liberty of an unmolested life. And that’s worth fighting for.