One Battle After Another (4/5 Stars)

For the first fifteen minutes of this movie, I wasn’t sure what year this movie was taking place in. The setting seemed vaguely contemporaneous, but the characters and their actions seem to exist in the 1960s-1970s. We are introduced to a domestic terrorist outfit called the French 75. Leonardo DiCaprio plays their bomb expert. The main baddie is Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. They stick up banks and declare that the money is being used to fund black liberation and civil revolution. What they lack in a coherent plan is made up for with narcissistic delusions of grandeur.

It doesn’t take more than fifteen minutes of screen time before reality sets in. The United States Government, led by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (played by Sean Penn), arrests if not assassinates most of them. As Perfidia is being wheeled away in shackles, the arresting officers take out their smart phones and take selfies with her. And that is how I finally understood that this was taking place post-2007. Which is ridiculous when you think about it. Because no matter how crazy you believe our politics presently is, it still isn’t as crazy as it was in the 1960s-1970s when you had real domestic terrorists bandying about the country planting bombs (Weather Underground), engaging in shooting matches with the local police (Black Panthers), and sticking up banks (Patty Heart’s Symbionese Liberation Army).

The details of terrorism morph over time. Like criminals in general, terrorists live on the cutting edge of technology and infrastructure. In the mid-20th Century, the new interstate highway system and the arrival of civilian air travel allowed criminals to complete their activities and escape with unprecedented speed and distance from traditional authorities. The government took some time to catch up, but they did, which is why we no longer have such a scourge of serial killers and international terrorists. The new frontier today is in cyberspace, but “One Battle After Another” is stuck in the past. I am informed that Writer/Director Paul Thomas Anderson adapted this screenplay from a 1990 book by Thomas Pynchon titled “Vineland”. That would make sense, because the conceit of the movie would play much better if the prologue had taken place in the 1970s and the rest of the movie took place at the turn of the nineties.

Still here we are. Countering the 1970s vibe of leftist extremists, we are introduced to a very Reaganesque vibe of right-wing conspirators. They call themselves the Knights of St. Nicholas, gather in expensive tunnels beneath a California suburb, and seem to concern themselves solely with fighting the equally fictitious French 75. Col. Steven J. Lockjaw is presented with an opportunity to join this fabled league of white supremacists but encounters a difficult problem with a background check. You see, Col. Lockjaw had an affair with Perfidia Beverly Hills and the child she bore around the time of her arrest, could either be his or Leonardo DiCaprio’s. If it is his, he will have to dispose of this child. If not, well, its not that big of a deal, but I think the plan is to kill her anyway.

As is usual in the USA, the idiocy of delusional left-wing extremists fuels the excesses of the more formidable and much better funded right-wing kind. If the French 75 create an annoyance akin to a housefly, the Knights of St. Nicholas provoke a solution akin to swatting the same with a baseball bat. Col. Steven J. Lockjaw creates a false emergency to utilize his military force to infiltrate a small town in Northern California to search for his potential daughter, now about sixteen years old, named Willa (played here by Chase Infiniti). Colonel Lockjaw uses the army – not a SWAT Team, not a cadre of FBI agents – to search for a private citizen. He interrupts the prom of a local high school with a squadron of soldiers armed with assault rifles. Then he detains and interrogates the children to find Willa. (A very good performance is given by James Ratterman as the main army interrogator. He has very good screen presence and I was not surprised to learn that he is not an actor. He is an actual retired army interrogator.)

This is an extraordinary crime and fuels a chase around Northern California in which the French 75 abduct Willa to save her from Lockjaw, who relentlessly chases after her, all the while Leo DiCaprio tries to find his daughter and save her from everybody else. Meanwhile, the false emergency concerns an underground trafficking pipeline of illegal immigrants from Mexico. This pipeline is conducted by Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (played by Benicio Del Toro) who moonlights as a karate instructor while upstairs/downstairs of his dojo illegal immigrants sleep on mats. With all the crazy Americans on both extreme sides of the political spectrum around, Benecio Del Toro has done well to immerse himself in the calming stoicism of eastern philosophy. I am reminded of the hustler in Sean Baker’s “Prince of Broadway” whose illicit store on Canal Street is raided by the authorities and who, in the next scene, tells an employee to stick around because he will have something else going on in a few weeks. He just takes it in stride. I can only imagine what real illegal immigrants think of our cultural conflagrations. I presume it is not so different. After all, for every day they get to work and earn money in this country, they are playing with house money.

All these characters are well drawn, and the movie moves along at a fair clip. Del Toro and Sean Penn put in good work. Sean Penn is the type of movie star who seems to lose and gain inches of height between roles. Here he is at his shortest. Leonardo DiCaprio, more than anything, is a very good tastemaker and producer. He lends his star quality, no better or worse in this movie than in others, to get the movie made, which are always interesting stories told by very good filmmakers. He seems to be going through the list of all the best directors of his generation and will at the end have worked with most of them. I hear he will be working with Damien Chazelle next on an Evel Knievel biopic. I bet that one will be good too.

What can we say about Paul Thomas Anderson? He is one of the best moviemakers around and has quietly over a few decades has produced a kaleidoscopic portrait of California at varying times and places. (The sole exception is Phantom Thread which could exist just to confirm that P.T. could locate his movies anywhere if only he felt like it). It would have been a bit more interesting if he hadn’t changed the temporal setting of the book or at least updated the crimes and criminal outfits to fit the 21st century. For instance, there is a lot of crime being enabled by the dark web and Bitcoin. Wouldn’t it have been better if this movie was about that sort of criminal network. But maybe we don’t quite understand how that works yet. There isn’t that clarity that comes only with hindsight.