The Revolutionaries

One Battle After Another

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER. For geeks of a certain age and inclination, a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie has been — and hopefully always will be — an occasion for tremendous excitement. We’ve been down since Hard Eight (1996) — which should rightfully be titled Sydney but that’s a diatribe for another day — and may have, in moments of uncharacteristic, youthful self-assurance, preemptively touted Magnolia (1999) as the greatest movie of all time. I guess I’m no longer speaking for all the other geeks.

Anyway, it’s old news that Anderson remains one of the most exciting, inquisitive filmmakers of his generation. But it’s a novel experience to see a movie he shot in our neck of the literal woods (mere blocks from one’s own house!) and adapted from the work of one our favorite local(ish) recluses. And while I’m not motivated by spite, I do have some professional-grade grudge holders in my family tree, so when it became clear that we (the Editorial we, which in this case actually means me and the editor) were not invited to the local gala premiere of One Battle After Another, I set out to see it on the biggest screen I could comfortably drive to in a day that was also near a luxury hotel. OK, that’s disingenuous; in my geekiness, I had already planned the trip, but I guess my vindictiveness runs deeper than I let on. 

In reality, Anderson continues to make it clear that the release strategy for One Battle is a truly intentional one. Having shot the thing in VistaVision for release in IMAX, he has planted a flag for the intersection of cinema art and entertainment. This is a reminder that an event movie can mean something and still be ferociously entertaining. Based on the rapturous response from the deeply varied and fairly packed house at the Metreon 16, people seem to get it. 

Teasing out the most trenchant narrative from Thomas Pynchon’s dark, delightfully shaggy 1990 novel Vineland, Anderson has made the biggest, most “political” work of his career and what may well prove to be the closest thing he’s ever had to a blockbuster. 

One Battle starts out 16 years into the past of its present, where Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) met Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) on the battlefield of violent activism and, intoxicated by passion and purpose and the smell of cordite, they fell in love. That union produced a baby, Charlene, but also drew the ire of an officious prick called Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), precipitating Pat and Charlene’s renaming as Bob and Willa Ferguson, and a hurried escape into the sheltering hollows of Baktan Cross, a sanctuary city in the wilds of far Northern California. 

In the present day, Willa (Chase Infiniti) has become a powerful young person in her own right, albeit one with no concept of the trouble her parents once got up to. And Bob, well, Bob has become the quintessential, bedraggled burnout of the sort most of us know all too well. A self-proclaimed fan of drugs and alcohol, he’s wiled away a decade and half raising a daughter and self-medicating the parts of his life he’d rather forget. But long-memoried Lockjaw, recently empowered by the scurrilous Christmas Adventurers Club, intends to make Bob answer for the past. 

One of the great joys of Thomas Pynchon’s novels lies in their shambolic discursions, and Anderson seems to understand that as well as anyone, having taken Inherent Vice and rendered it essentially whole cloth in 2014. But he is also one the most adept, nuanced screenwriters working in the medium, and so has been able to parse Vineland as a modern-day satire/parable, casting Lockjaw as a not-quite pitiable agent of stupidity and prejudice, deploying federal shock-troops in extrajudicial activity, sowing chaos in the streets to obscure his own base motives. 

One Battle presents a terrible, shameful picture of our present moment, but it does so with what would be, in other hands, an impossible balance of humor, spectacle, suspense and consummate technique. Equal parts tragedy and triumph, evocation of the necessity of resistance to tyranny and exposé of stupid venality of old, white, racist men, it is a call to arts and arms cleverly disguised as the best action comedy, maybe of all time. It is also a genuine culmination of Anderson’s body of work, the first of his movies to incorporate the giddy kineticism and discovery of his early stuff with the statelier, grand mastery of his later output. It is as big and bold and scary and warm-hearted as anything he’s ever done, which puts it pretty high up in the pantheon indeed. 

And one can’t help but get a dorky little kick out of spotting familiar faces and places. R. 161M. BROADWAY, MINOR. l

 John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.

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For showtimes, call Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456, Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.

This article appears in Red-Light Women, Part II.