What could be more potent story than a former 60’s radical, now fugitive, Pat (Leo DiCaprio), searching for his abducted teenage daughter (Willa Chase Infiniti) in the two decades after when government is growing more militant itself and director Paul Thomas Anderson has learned a thing or two about fatherhood?
PTA’s One Battle After Another, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s counterculture Vineland, may not have the sexiest title of the year, but it is one of the best comic action, message-underneath dramas of the year, and considering the heft of the director’s There Will Be Blood and The Master, as well the comic Boogie Nights, commensurate with his ability to tell a challenging story that culminates with a car chase worthy of Bullitt. It's a complete cinematic experience with rolling roads and deadly pursuits emblematic of dangerous times.
As the former explosives expert of The French 75 violent activists, incited by a pull-out-all-the stops Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), Pat is still a potent force to be pursued by amoral army Captain Steven Lockjaw (a great Sean Penn), the kind of machine who would jettison his own daughter if justice fit his white-man, racist ethic. His attempt to join the Christmas Adventurers Club (read white supremacists) is just one of the comic bits PTA works in well.
Reminiscent of the relentless Anton Chigurh (Javier Barden) from the equally arid Southwest of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, Lockjaw is a precursor of today’s far-right and left coalitions determined to cleanse the landscape of misguided idealists and revolutionaries like Pat. Like life itself, Pat et al. are changing right before our eyes in a matter of decades.
Although set without our annoying cellphones but full of shadow organizations and treachery and betrayal, and with violent do-gooders on both sides of the spectrum, PTA’s perspective is about where our extremism will lead to a landscape of blindly murderous operatives in our own time. The film moves from fascinating militant revolution to confused motives, and never a dull moment.
Leo and Penn are at the peak of their performing power, a film that drives us on a roller coaster of motives while like our super-hero Marvel and DC extravaganzas (it cost $100 million), we are looking to reconcile family and often fathers and daughters.
In One Battle After Another, action and ideals propel the imagination into a world that warns about motives politically and personally out of control. Given the incendiary death of Charley Kirk to make this film contemporary, PTA has crafted an allegory featuring the breakdown of family and nations.
Not bad for a comic action film!
One Battle after Another
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood)
Screenplay: Anderson, Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic), Sean Penn (Milk)
Rating: R
Length: 2h 41m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio.Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com