Looking for a Brighter Day in Paul Thomas Anderson's Brilliant One Battle After Another

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER 

(Paul Thomas Anderson, USA, 2025, 162 minutes) 

Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction 

Will no longer be so damn relevant 

And women will not care if Dick finally got down with Jane 

On Search for Tomorrow 

Because black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day 

The revolution will not be televised 

-Gil Scott-Heron, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised"

Leave it to PT Anderson to take a text set in the 1980s–Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland–and update it to the 2020s without missing a beat. 

In other words, One Battle After Another, his 10th feature, doesn't recreate Reagan's America, but rather Trump's America, and everything about it feels up to the minute, because one directly leads to the other, and most of the action takes place in California and Mexico (in 2014, Anderson adapted Pynchon's comic noir Inherent Vice, also featuring Benicio del Toro). 

 

Notably, there are no direct references to Trump, so he has no grounds to sue Warner Bros for defamation, but that's never stopped him before.  

The film, a multi-genre affair, starts as a love story about two revolutionaries before shifting to a love story, of a kind, about a father and a daughter. (At 162 minutes, it may be long, but not as long as 1999's Magnolia, which clocked in at 188.) As the film begins, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, who knocked me out in A.V. Rockwell's debut, A Thousand and One), are living the life of left-wing freedom fighters in the Southern California of the 2000s. They deal with guns and incendiary devices, but they're not generally violent towards their enemies–of which there are many. 

Their French 75 compatriots include Deandra (Regina Hall, effectively understated), Mae West (Alana Haim from Licorice Pizza), Laredo (Wood Harris), and Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle, reuniting with Hall after Andrew Bujalski's great Support the Girls). The nicknames and code phrases, like "Green Acres, Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville Junction," are a means of protection. Bob, for instance, is also known as Ghetto Pat, though McHayle's alter ego isn't fictional–she's been rapping as Junglepussy since 2012.

You could argue about the effectiveness of the French 75's tactics, which involve a fair amount of property destruction, but their concerns about the rights of immigrants and pregnant people seem pretty reasonable. To Anderson, they may not be heroes per se, but they're definitely not villains. 

They're a committed, if dysfunctional unit centered around Bob and Perfidia, who have an intensely sexual bond, not least because violence turns Perfidia on. 

She's always up for a fuck, but especially when a bomb is about to go off in their vicinity. Bob loves his wife, but he isn't quite so reckless. When he finds out she's pregnant, though, he's thrilled. 

Bob has no idea, however, that her life has taken a turn. It starts when she encounters Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, also returning from Licorice Pizza), a right-wing Army man, during an migrant-rescue operation at the California-Mexico border, and sexually humiliates him, after which he becomes obsessed. Later, during another operation, he gets her alone in a public restroom, where he makes a deal: she gets to go free, but only after servicing him. Penn has never played a character less appealing what with his ugly politics, lascivious ogling, stiff-legged gait, and Hitler Youth haircut. 

When Perfidia loses her cool during a robbery, and shoots a security guard, Lockjaw makes another kind of deal, but she has her limits, and disappears into the ether, leaving Lockjaw without his secret girlfriend and Bob with a newborn baby named Charlene (who will become Willa). Granted, Perfidia never warmed up to her daughter. Accustomed to having her husband to herself, she didn't appreciate the way Bob doted on her all the time. 

From there, Anderson skips ahead 16 years to father and daughter living in a US sanctuary city called Baktan Cross--the film was originally titled The Battle of Baktan Cross--where Willa (Presumed Innocent's Chase Infiniti) attends high school and Bob smokes pot all day, his revolutionary days long behind him. The two aren't close, but Willa is buoyed by the idea that her mother was a hero, unlike her layabout father, who has neglected to her that Perfidia turned rat before disappearing ("perfidia" is Spanish for betrayal). 

One Battle After Another is the kind of film that takes the occasional break to allow you to catch your breath before revving up again. Just as Bob and Perfidia are constantly on the run in the first half, when Lockjaw tracks them down, Bob and Willa hit the streets with assistance from Bob's French 75 associates--Deandra above all--and a very good movie becomes truly great. 

Though Hall has the least showy part of all, Deandra is the most heroic character, because she's fast, efficient, empathetic, and fiercely loyal. She isn't especially talkative, but Licorice Pizza cinematographer Michael Bauman often focuses on her eyes, and Deandra's face always has a story to tell.

With apologies to Teyana Taylor, who gives it her all, the father-daughter dynamic marks the point at which I became more emotionally invested, and Infiniti holds her own with DiCaprio in peak form. She holds her own with Penn, too, whose Lockjaw catches up with Willa after she and Bob get separated. 

Compared to stockbroker Jordan Belfort in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street or actor Rick Dalton in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Bob is a shambling mess of a man to the extent that the entire film almost plays like an anti-pot PSA--with the possible exception of the pot-growing nuns who show up towards the end--but it's where Anderson locates most of the humor. The sequences between DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro as a zen sensei and migrant protector, especially, crackle with odd couple energy. 

The less-funny parts involve the treatment of Mexican immigrants–though they have fiendishly clever ways to avoid the authorities thanks to production designer Florencia Martin's Rube Goldberg-like constructions–whereas Lockjaw longs for acceptance from a white supremacist organization, the Christmas Adventurers, that plays like a joke–especially Kevin Tighe's old codger–except it's one we now live with on a daily basis. 

Law & Order's Tony Goldwyn, who always looks like a smooth motherfucker, is exceptionally well cast as one of the Christmas leaders; especially ironic since this dedicated Christian Nationalist is played by the member of a rather famous Jewish family (Tony is the grandson of movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn).

Each character plays into a turbo-charged satire about the rise of fascism in America and the attempts of a desperate citizenry to fight back. There's no perfect way to overhaul a corrupt system, but the French 75 give it a go.

In adapting Vineland, a novel with which he's long been enamored, Anderson changed most everything, except the basic plot, location, and characters--he even changed the names. More than that, though, he made it a film about race. Bob, for instance, is a white man surrounded by powerful Black women. ("My child comes from a whole line of revolutionaries," Starletta DuPois's Grandma Jennie explains.) Willa even looks a little like PT Anderson’s partner, Maya Rudolph, might have looked at the same age. 

I'm not saying that One Battle After Another is autobiographical, though Anderson and Rudolph have three daughters, but I'm not saying it isn't. That said, it is, without a doubt, a tribute to the badassery of Black women. 

One Battle After Another opens everywhere on Sept 26. Images: the IMDb via Warner Bros (Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Infiniti and Regina Hall) and Columbia College Chicago, Infiniti's alma mater (Infiniti, a kickboxing instructor, in karate pose).