‘One Battle After Another’ REVIEW: Revolution is in the air by Zo Arroyo
‘One Battle After Another’ REVIEW: Revolution is in the air
Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
“You know what freedom is?”, tells Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro) to Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a terrified ex-revolutionary trying to find his daughter. “No fear.” In One Battle After Another, there is no doubt that Bob will do anything to reunite with his daughter, but when he’s hanging out of a car window, Sensei manning the wheel, careening down the road, hightailing it from the cops, preparing to jump as a last ditch escape route to continue on his journey, he’s struck with the terrifying thought of planting face-first into the dirt and freezes, looking more like a shaggy dog sticking its head out to feel the wind than an action hero.
DiCaprio is no stranger to playing action roles (think Blood Diamond, Body of Lies, and Inception), but in a career mostly spent negating whatever charisma and conventional machismo he had in his youth, it’s no surprise that he now chooses to play a hero that needs a little nudging — or as gentle a nudge you can give when you really need him to jump from a speeding car. And for a star that loves to work with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including certified legends Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, there might be no faster yes to an elevator pitch than to the one that probably goes “Hello, this is Paul Thomas Anderson and I’m making an action-comedy movie.”
DiCaprio and PTA make perfect sense together; the unconventional movie star paired with the best writer-director of unconventional movie star parts. Where else but in PTA’s world would it make sense for Tom Cruise to follow up his apex double-header of Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire by playing a damaged, misogynist grifter motivational speaker and sex-life-coach?
And who else but PTA would follow up their most critically acclaimed movie up to that point with their spin on an Adam Sandler romcom at a time when Sandler wasn’t just underestimated by critics but reviled? PTA clearly loves actors, often bringing out the best in his collaborators — and vice versa. Together they gnaw at the heart of what makes them special and synthesize it on screen in a way no one’s done quite before.
In One Battle After Another’s opening act, we find Bob as the explosives expert of the French 75, a revolutionary group devoted to freeing oppressed peoples from the hands of an authoritarian and fascist government, by any means necessary. This is not mere political allusion. The film is explicitly set in contemporary America and uses familiar imagery of tumultuous struggle. It’s not mere coincidence that much of the major story rolls out when a paramilitary force takes over a sanctuary city for someone’s personal and political gain under the pretense of rounding up illegal immigrants. It’s not prescient on PTA’s part to know that these kinds of stories would be exactly the endless battles in the U.S. today as it is an awareness that these battles didn’t just start today and they won’t be over by tomorrow.
Teyana Taylor as Perfidia Beverly Hills and Sean Penn as Col. Steven Lockjaw in One Battle After Another | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
The film’s opening sequence sees the French 75 infiltrate a detention camp along the Mexico-US border, liberating detained immigrants and zip-tying detention officers, including Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who takes an immediate, disturbing liking towards the revolutionary group’s most magnetic member, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Lockjaw is later incensed to find that she’s already in a relationship with Bob.
Where Bob is the reliable foot soldier who needs to know the orders before he can do his job, Perfidia is the de facto leader who takes charge and dives headlong into danger. The sharp contrast in their personalities makes them an odd couple, and Perfidia’s mother tells Bob as much: “You know, you are so unsuitable for my daughter. My child comes from a long line of revolutionaries. And you look so lost.” It’s about as accurate a reading of him as you can get. Perfidia is in it for the long run, motivated to make the world a better place, at any cost. Bob is in it seemingly mostly because Perfidia is in it. As Perfidia, Taylor exudes both aggressive power and steely confidence, the kind of energy that easily ropes Bob and Lockjaw in her wake.
When a baby enters the picture, Bob instantly ditches explosives for diapers. It’s as if to him the revolution was all fun and games, but now, with a family, the real adult stuff starts. He views the domestic calling as not only separate from a revolutionary one, but more important too. Reeling from postpartum depression, Perfidia questions his fealty to the cause and wrestles with the extra roles she must play. Her devotion to the cause remains unwavering despite Bob’s protests, until a bank heist turns unexpectedly violent, an escape chase goes wrong, and Lockjaw cuts the French 75 at the knees, forcing Bob to flee with his infant daughter. P
TA loves a close-up, and when shot on VistaVision and projected as big as possible here, it might be One Battle After Another’s most effective weapon in the arsenal. As Bob is being instructed on assuming new identities with his daughter in the small town of Baktan Cross, abandoning everyone and everything he knew for her future, DiCaprio nails the glassy eyed look of a man overwhelmed by fear, by a mind racing with endless, terrifying possibilities. You can see him ask himself how he’ll raise his daughter on his own without uttering a single word. And while all that sounds like enough material to make its own movie, that only really makes up the first 20 or so breakneck minutes of a film that never takes its foot off the gas.
Chase Infiniti as Willa Ferguson in One Battle After Another | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
The film cuts ahead 16 years with their daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), now a teenager and exuding the same strong spirit and leadership qualities that her mother had. The same cannot be said about Bob, who has aged into a cross between an absolute mess — smoking pot and hitting vapes, and drinking and driving like its normal — and a 50-something, embarrassing but well-meaning father, lecturing Willa’s high school history teacher on the revolutionary figures she should be teaching, correcting his daughter’s misused figure-of-speech in the middle of an argument, asking her about her friends’ pronouns — he just wants to get it right, she exasperatedly replies that remembering “they/them” is not that hard — but the deeper source of their strife is that she’s raised in the context of his revolutionary past, yet he wants her to stay as underground as possible.
Bob’s heart is in the right place, but it’s also ruled by fear. That fear means living further away from society, banning the use of phones, and being cautious about things as simple as letting Willa go to the school dance. These aren’t anxieties unique to parents trying to escape the grip of their past. The father-daughter relationship at the heart of One Battle After Another is grounded in something real, which is crucial when the two characters spend more time apart than they do together.
Their relationship is instantly recognizable and believable. As the father of teenagers, PTA seems to channel his own love and anxieties for his kids, wrestling with the responsibilities of keeping them safe in an oppressive world while also raising them to go out in the world and change it for the better. Of his many fears, perhaps Bob’s greatest is that he’s not cut out for the job of protecting her anymore, and maybe never was. As he poignantly laments later to Sensei, “I can’t even do her hair.”
That past he’s spent the last 16 years protecting Willa from does inevitably catch up in the form of Col. Lockjaw returning to quash his own history — and insecurities. As Lockjaw, Penn’s performance is as funny as it is terrifying. He walks with the straightest back imaginable, as though an invisible string is pulling him upright every single second, and talks about everything with the same level of gravity and formality, whether it’s an order for a contract killing, the purchase of a jet ski, or the gender of a baby.
Then there’s his haircut, sporting a tuft of hair just in the middle and shaved all around the back and sides, like a baby whose hair hasn’t fully grown yet. He can hide all he wants behind his rank, his rifle, or his tight shirt, but it’ll always be clear as day that he is the modern American grifter; he subscribes to no beliefs other than the ones that’ll get him a seat at the table. And what could be more terrifying than dealing with a man who is willing to sell out everything?
Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson in One Battle After Another | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
Lockjaw’s arrival in Baktan Cross drives the remnants of the French 75 to show up and extract Willa to a safe house, separating her from Bob. Reuniting with her should be easy, except for the fact that, thanks to years of pot-addled complacency, Bob can’t remember a lick of the revolutionary code that’ll get him the coordinates to the safe house. As he searches the deep recesses of his mind for words he can no longer find, all hell breaks loose in Baktan Cross, further complicating his simple mission. Lockjaw and his paramilitary group aren’t just hot on Bob and Willa’s tail, but on all the immigrants in the town too. The story demands a man of action to rise up and lock-in to Tom Cruise-esque shape (Sensei Sergio’s complete line about freedom after all is “You know what freedom is? No fear. Just like Tom fucking Cruise”), but One Battle After Another is all the better — and funnier — for having a 50-year-old man moving like a 50-year-old man actually should.
Bob is more The Dude from The Big Lebowski than Ethan Hunt, running around town in a plaid robe that he looks like he slept in and sporting shades off the rack to hide his bleary eyes. When Bob has to do rooftop parkour alongside young skaters to evade Lockjaw’s troops, he runs a step or two slower than them and always chooses the path of least resistance — and athleticism. Leave all the jumping for the kids, he’s taking the ladder down instead.
Bob is also an unconventional hero in the sense that his mission is not saving Willa – this isn’t quite DiCaprio’s Taken – but getting back to her and the revolution. He goes through great lengths to do so, breaking away from the sedentary life he’d grown used to and braving all the fears he’s spent years avoiding. It's the greatest show of love he can give, especially when she’s confronted by what a world without love looks like. And he doesn’t do it because he thinks he has to make some effortful show to win her over again. He does it simply because he’s her dad.
If freedom means no fear, then there are few filmmakers freer than Paul Thomas Anderson. He’s enjoyed a blank check career where he’s never felt the need — or the pressure – to repeat himself. He continues to evolve his style and the stories he tells. It would seem easy to remain in the exciting whiz-bang Scorsese-esque style of a film like Boogie Nights, which opens on an audacious oner beginning with an announcement of its own title on a marquee, then swooping down – the cinematic equivalent of a middle finger to executives who wanted to meddle with the film and change the title – and even easier to keep wanting that kind of thing from him.
After doubling down on the audacity with Magnolia, PTA shifts his energies from manic to something a little more controlled. He got older. When he returned to the 70s milieu of Boogie Nights with Licorice Pizza, the characters are still just as lost but the world they’re in is more elegiac than glitzy.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson on the set of One Battle After Another | Photo courtesy of Warner Bros.
For anyone that loves his films but still misses some of his kinetic flare, One Battle After Another is the perfect synthesis of the many sides of Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s both a reflection on the passage of time and the way it weathers down beliefs, as well as a thrilling chase film and an absurdist comedy about the men who want to try and rule the world.
The film’s big final set piece is a three-car chase across California hills that would sound quite boring on paper — who wants to watch a car chase with no obstacles, no lane switching, just three cars driving in a straight line — but it’s PTA filming it, so he shoots the scene with a long lens, which compresses all the peaks and valleys of the hills closer to one another so you can see each successive rise and pummeling drop of the road like you’re riding a rollercoaster, hurtling at 150 miles-per-hour to a heart-racing finish.
Chase is an apt name for the newcomer actress who plays Willa. It’s a coming-of-age story for her as much as it is a reckoning-with-age story for Bob, and she proves to be quite an adept fighter on her own. If Bob can’t protect her from the world, he can at least prepare her, so that when she does, inevitably, go out, she’ll be ready.
You can’t change the world from your home, but fascism will show up to the door and blow it down regardless. If this all sounds like heavy material for a movie, just know that One Battle After Another is endlessly entertaining, and probably the most fun to be had with a big budget blockbuster that’s actually got ideas on its mind. It has a runtime of 162 minutes but feels half as long as that with how relentlessly paced it is. Early on, Bob declares, “From here on out, it’s one battle after another.” He wasn’t kidding.
As far as major blockbusters about parental and national anxieties go, PTA is not casting his own daughter to play a hallucinatory Hiroshima victim like Christopher Nolan did in Oppenheimer. He’s got a little more hope than that. His sentimentality has not gone away, even as he’s matured as an artist. If anything, becoming a parent has only made him more optimistic. Bob laments his own generation’s revolutionary failures, but the story doesn’t end with him. The world is still ours for the changing.
‘One Battle After Another’ is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
