Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest star-studded ensemble, One Battle After Another, has garnered the best audience reception of his career. While Anderson is rightfully considered a master in his artform by critics and film aficionados, One Battle After Another pierced the veil and resulted in the director’s highest opening weekend at the box office last weekend.
The reception to One Battle After Another comes as no surprise. This is a film that has its finger on the pulse of America and shines a light on unspoken truths about our desire for change and the costs to get us there.
Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland, the film explores the lasting repercussions of the actions of two former revolutionaries, Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), when their teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), is hunted by their old adversary, Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a white supremacist looking to cover-up any evidence of his past misdeeds. With Perfidia having vanished 16 years earlier, a burnt-out and paranoid Bob sets out to rescue his daughter with the help of two revolutionaries, Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) and Deandra (Regina Hall), who have their own battles left to fight.
Much already has been made about the film’s opening sequence in which the revolutionary group the French 75 free Mexican immigrants from a detention center at the border and provide safe harbor. Of course, it’s easy to see parallels between this act and the current outcry against ICE and the anti-immigrant propaganda of the current administration, a fascistic extension of the immigrant policies of previous administrations.
While some argue the film celebrates political violence, it doesn’t at all. It depicts it as a temporary solution, one that, when drawing battle lines, only results in casualties on both sides and creates victims out of those who suffer under the same realities of America. It’s no mere coincidence that the security guard Perfidia reluctantly shoots and kills during a botched bank robbery is an elderly Black man, and it’s this act that breaks her spirit despite her seemingly steadfast resolve to put an end to a society that uses its currency to ensure that wealth remains at the top, while those below are left with vanishingly few alternatives in which to survive, let alone thrive. Despite good intentions, the French 75 cannot chart a true and lasting path to freedom through the means they’ve chosen.
“You know what freedom is? No fear,” Del Toro’s Sensei tells DiCaprio’s Bob as he encourages him to jump from a moving car while the police are in pursuit. “No fear.” It sounds cool, and even cooler when Sergio adds, “Just like Tom fuckin’ Cruise.” But it’s more than just a battle cry. It is a revolutionary concept, and a hard one to swallow because there’s every reason to be fearful, and that often only grows with age.
Paul Thomas Anderson has always been possessed by the spirit of revolution. Quite literally, he owes his career to a revolutionary act, dropping out of film school at NYU after two days, deciding that school turned filmmaking into a chore. He went on to teach himself how to direct by watching and studying films he liked. The result has always made Anderson a bit of an iconoclast with an anti-authoritarian streak who rejects the traditional, and occasionally pretentious, qualifiers of a film’s merits as determined by academia while also being largely embraced by those same academic institutions he rejected. He’s part of a generation of revolutionary directors, film school dropouts and “never-wents” like Richard Linklater, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who saw the cynicism within their Gen X community, who tried to highlight the greed and disaffected state of America and zoomed in on it.
There’s a short monologue in Anderson’s first feature, Hard Eight, in which the character Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson) tells this story:
“The other night over at the El Dorado, I saw a cat have a heart attack right at the craps table. I mean, he’s in the middle of a hot shoot, starts gettin’ all bothered and sweaty and shit, and next thing you know, bam! The old motherfucker just keels over. Now, the joke of it is, the game just keeps going on. I mean, people are yelling, ‘Place the 8.’ ‘Somebody call an ambulance!’ ‘Place the 9.’ ‘Place the 6.’ ‘Somebody dial 911!’ Meanwhile, this old bastard’s layin’ on the floor, tongue out, turning purple and shit! And people are still playing!”
And ain’t that America? Folks in pain, dying, and we’ll offer indirect help while we continue to try and make our money and play our games to distract us from the death happening in our midst. That right there is the battle. Same as it ever was. Gen X pointed a camera at it, but it didn’t change things. Millennials took to social media, and again, it didn’t change things. Most of us want something different than the America we have now, than even the world we have now.
But many are too afraid to fully commit ourselves to changing it. Most of us have been guilty of it. Hell, I’ve been guilty, too. We retweet and share donation pages and consider that to be the extent of our power. We acknowledge the abuses of power happening in America, the funding of genocide, the demonization of transgender individuals, the dehumanization of Black, Latino and Arab individuals, and we may even think of this consciousness as small acts of revolution, but culturally, we lost sight of being true revolutionaries once the initial anger subsided and capitalism called us with shiny new distractions that so easily stole our attention.
It feels like this, more than anything, is what Paul Thomas Anderson is grappling with in One Battle After Another. He’s not placing blame or finger-wagging but grappling with the revolutionary impotence that comes for us all as we eventually accept the idea that we’re powerless and this is just the way things are. And why is that? Because a lot of us well-intentioned individuals are, understandably, afraid of losing what little we have, and to be revolutionary too often means giving that up.
When you look at the great social revolutions of America in terms of organization and impact, Black women have been at the forefront of that change. Anderson is clearly aware of that, and undoubtedly his marriage to Maya Rudolph has had some impact on his perspective and awareness. The majority of the revolutionary figures we see in One Battle After Another are Black women, mirroring the realities of America. Those who have the least in terms of rights and respect often have the most fight.
So, what about Bob? It’s a fair question to ask why Bob is the central character of One Battle After Another. Setting aside the star-power factor of DiCaprio, the French 75’s revolution is primarily concerned with the disenfranchisement of Black and Latino populations. So why isn’t Taylor’s Perfidia or Hall’s Deandra the lead figure in this? It’s because Anderson knows his limits, and as a white man in his 50s, his perspective is restricted, as is Bob’s, because they live in a society that affords them the ability to take a backseat in the revolution, more so than any other demographic.
Once Perfidia gives birth to Willa, Bob is satisfied with putting their revolutionary days behind them. But Perfidia refuses to give up the fight, not only as a means of rejecting the patriarchal views of motherhood in which women are often expected to set aside their own ambitions and become mom first and foremost, but also because she’s given up so much of herself already to fight her war against the system, including her body being exchanged for the sexual satisfaction of Lockjaw under the condition that he’ll keep her out of prison. Perfidia’s postpartum misery is tangled up in these emotions and the struggle between who she thought she’d be and who she’s become. As someone who we learn comes from a long line of revolutionaries, that is a complicated space of personhood that Anderson can empathetically showcase a part of, but never fully share a space with or tap into. Such is the writer’s burden.
Yet through Bob, Anderson finds his way into this story in a way that feels self-reflective and in conversation with a whole generation of coulda-been revolutionaries. Bob supports the cause, but he can never be the face of the French 75 because it’s both bigger than him and beyond him. DiCaprio portrays the character as someone who is both actively trying to be progressive but also frustrated by his limitations. While many of the same social issues he fought for 16 years ago remain the same, the methodology and handling of them have drastically changed as the result of changing awareness to gender nonconformity, safe spaces and trigger words. It’s not that Bob looks down upon these changes — well, maybe apart from trigger words — but that they make him all the more aware that he doesn’t fit into this world anymore, and perhaps never entirely did if not for his devotion to Perfidia.
He doesn’t know what battles to focus on, as there have been so many born in addition to the ones he fought when he was younger. Midway through the film, he tells Sensei Sergio, “I don’t get mad. I don’t get mad about anything anymore.” And therein lies Bob’s biggest frustration. The passion has burnt out of him, and without it he can no longer be a revolutionary, even as those battles, sometimes humorously because of Bob’s lack of awareness, continue to be fought around him, like Sensei Sergio and his family sheltering and aiding Mexican immigrants.
On his quest to rescue his daughter, Bob finds himself stumbling into one revolution after another, while his priorities remain set on finding Willa. Willa, through the course of her own journey, in meeting other Black women who are part of the revolution, and in her battle against Lockjaw, finds a revolutionary spirit within herself. One Battle After Another then ultimately becomes Willa’s fight for her own freedom, and the fearlessness required for the next generation of change-makers.
While times in America are more politically fraught than ever, exacerbated by those in the highest offices of power, Hollywood has never entirely shied away from films that lean more toward one side than the other. It’s no surprise, given that the arts are subjected to so many funding cuts and acts of censorship by the current administration. But there is a certain level of caution, and maybe even occasionally cowardice, in how these political topics are handled.
The result is often films that are prevented from making a strong statement, or well-intentioned filmmakers whose perspective is ill-suited to tackling such themes so attached to race, creed, gender, history and war. So, we get movies in which corporate coded characters fight unnamed enemies, AI adversaries are controlled by no one, and war-torn countries in which the Indigenous populations charge against their machine-gun wielding enemies with farm tools. Those movies can be a lot of fun, well-made, and even great for what they’re going for. But they rely on allegorical readings and sometimes a change of context to really find a strong point that’s anything more than platitudes. Platitudes and ideas like kindness, unity and one man being the best of us to the point that we should all feel safe that the world’s most powerful weapon is in his hands, can certainly feel nice in a dark theater. But they aren’t revolutionary, even if we can momentarily feel like Tom fuckin’ Cruise.
Anderson does not succumb to what so many well-intentioned, progressive filmmakers do. There is no ubiquitous, non-specific enemy. The film directly points to the enemy, wealthy white supremacists who have inserted themselves into positions of political and military power, and ownership over businesses built on immigrant labor. They may fall under a very Pynchion fictional name, the Christmas Adventurers Club, but Anderson isn’t afraid to point to the source of America’s suffocation. But even in pointing them out, Anderson does not resolve to see them defeated. The Christmas Adventurers Club remains. There is an outright rejection of bromides that would give us some conclusion of reassurance. The enemy remains.
Bob, avoiding the white savior trope, is not some paragon who has all the answers and has suddenly rekindled his passion for being a revolutionary leader. Nor does it create magical negro figures out of Perfidia or Willa in terms of setting them up as singular chosen ones who can heal the country because they were born for that purpose. Both are permitted to make mistakes and fuck up. What Anderson ultimately does with Perfidia’s letter to her daughter serving as a testament, and invitation to Exodus, is emphasize that revolution and true freedom requires new solutions different from the acts of violence that defined her past. What solutions? We don’t know, but Anderson puts his hopes into the next generation to find out what it is. Mistakes will be made, but hopefully lasting change will be made as well. And with that notion, Anderson brushes aside the remaining traces of Gen X cynicism he’s largely left behind and resets the stage for the next battle.
