We open on a detention centre. We end on the way to a protest. Sixteen years in-between and, as the leader of the film’s resistance movement, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) notes, nothing’s really changed. Perhaps it never will. And yet we keep fighting. One Battle After Another. Why? Because, as writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson so perfectly portrays in this truly intense, riotously funny and deeply heart-warming epic, the hope for a better world is kept alive by all those willing to fight for it, and so long as there are fighters, the dream will never die.
The nods to The Battle of Algiers and the American slave trade feel especially fitting in this regard. Despite the film’s modern setting (Anderson’s first contemporary piece since Punch Drunk Love; the rest have all been 20th century period pieces), there’s a noticeably 
timeless quality in the film’s depiction of resistance and oppressive law enforcement. The first act introduces us to the French 75, a zany, spirited band of freedom fighters headed by the charismatic, screen-stealing Perfidia, whose comically opposite husband Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio), who timidly stumbles alongside her. On their first mission, they free a group of detained immigrants, and Perfidia hilariously emasculates the head military officer, Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who then grows fascinated with her. But just when an overthrow of the brutal regime seems possible, everything comes crashing down, after a string of montaged assassinations, we cut to sixteen years later, the modern day, and besides the introduction of smartphones, nothing on a societal level changed.
For our protagonists, however, there couldn’t be a greater cause for hopelessness. Teyana has fled, and we now see the depths of depravity and muscle-tensing despicableness Lockjaw is capable of (aided by Penn’s wonderful performance). What’s left scattered of the French 75 have descended into bureaucracy and petty in-fighting. And the nervous but determined Pat Calhoun is now Bob Ferguson, a drunk slob who’s primary concern is no longer revolution, but his paranoid parenting of his only child, Willa (Chase Infintini). It’s only when Lockjaw’s application to join a covert, powerful white supremacist organisation is threatened by the ambiguous parentage of Willa, the mixed-race daughter of his ex-lover and obsession Perfidia, that all hell finally breaks loose, and the courage of Bob and the French 75 are tested to the ultimate degree.
Any detailed commentary on what comes next would be a crime against humanity, aside from praising the armchair-clenching intensity of the unfolding narrative and Jonny Greenwood’s jolting, beautifully-fitting score, the entrancing scope of the VistaVision cinematography (VistaVision is an old film format that blows up 35mm film to 70mm, or, in non-cinephile terms, enhances the film’s epicness), as well as the performance of Infintini, who moulds Willa into life with all the lively sass and grit of her mother and the vulnerability of her true father. The bulk of my attention and praise goes to Anderson for
crafting a film that so impactfully avoids succumbing to the depressing cynicism one might expect from a ‘film of our moment’ (look at the sheer pessimism that protrudes throughout this year’s Eddington, for example). The result is the third porridge of modernity and timelessness. Despite the world of oppression feeling so overwhelmingly trapped in the present day, mentions of MAGA or anything related to contemporary politics are cleverlyomitted, making for a film that, sadly, could feel equally as timely in most time periods (we’ve been fighting these battles for a long time). The film itself is a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, also about a group of counter-culture revolutionaries, but in the Reagan-era; incidentally, Anderson’s previous adaptation of a Pynchon work, Inherent Vice, also touched on the false promise of the hippie counter-culture movement, but failed where One Battle After Another triumphantly succeeds.
And where is that? In its sheer humanity. To take on the establishment in such a thrilling, climactic, poignant manner is commendable enough, but to deconstruct the entire cycle of despair that defines our age, and really every age before that, and still choose to believe, to have faith, that the next generation may, finally, change things, so long as they too keep believing and fighting, is simply excellent. Bravo, Anderson. Bravo.
I highly recommend experiencing One Battle After Another wherever you can, whenever you can, while it’s still in theatres. It may just be the film of our moment.
5/5
Image Credits – TheMovieDB
