One Battle After Another<\/a> gestated in Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s brain for more than a decade, but it feels as if it could have been written last week. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio in full goofball mode, playing a stoned, washed-up activist forced to go on the run in order to save his and his daughter\u2019s lives. One Battle After Another is a timeless but timely thrill ride with fascist military goons, devoted revolutionaries, and fiery protests. Anderson\u2019s portrait of a galvanized world is just as chaotic and ugly as our own, but his humanist approach both deepens the narrative and lets the movie\u2019s cast get away with skirting real-life political comparisons.<\/p>\n\u201cWe live in this world, and we\u2019re not blind,\u201d Anderson told moderator Doreen St. F\u00e9lix after a September 22 screening of the film in New York. \u201cAnd we\u2019re not too dumb, but you have to be able to focus on something you can hold in your hand. Obviously, [politics] come into focus in the background, but if they dominate your story, the audience will lose interest. I think I would lose interest.\u201d While the majority of the characters in the film operate on disparate sides of the political spectrum, Anderson made sure the relationships between them \u2014 even antagonistic ones \u2014 felt tangible.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s coming out at such a polarizing time in our country,\u201d DiCaprio added. He later said, \u201cWhen I read the script, [I found] you did a beautiful job of seamlessly weaving in this political extremism that\u2019s going on in our world right now \u2014 this idea that we\u2019re in such a polarized world and everyone\u2019s trying to belong somehow.\u201d That platitude \u2014 polarize \u2014 was used multiple times to describe the film\u2019s political world, even the nitty-gritty of it.<\/p>\n
But some of that vagueness is by design: Anderson wants the viewer to see the politics in the actual actions of the characters rather than through spoken polemics. The most \u201csuccessful\u201d political player in the film \u2014 the person who is actually a driving force of political action \u2014 isn\u2019t even one of the movie\u2019s central revolutionaries but rather a selfless karate teacher inspired by their work: Benicio del Toro\u2019s Sensei Sergio. \u201cIt\u2019s all there in the writing,\u201d del Toro said after the screening. \u201cHe\u2019s a friend of a friend [to these characters]. He is a friend \u2014 he\u2019s got this Harriet Tubman situation,\u201d wherein the Sensei is helping illegal immigrants find shelter, \u201cthat he\u2019s doing for no money. He\u2019s clean, altruistic.\u201d His generosity facilitates survival, not just for the film\u2019s main characters but for everyone he comes into contact with. DiCaprio agreed: \u201cFor me, there\u2019s an undercurrent of being good to one another, of helping each other out in the hardest and most polarized times.\u201d One polarizing day after another.<\/p>\n
Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They\u2019re making Leonardo DiCaprio do TikTok videos for this movie. Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures One Battle After…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":162616,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[17532,49,48,72367,75,15462,337,44,15463,15461,84341,84343,84342,17534,84344],"class_list":{"0":"post-162615","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-benicio-del-toro","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-chase-infiniti","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-leonardo-dicaprio","14":"tag-movies","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-one-battle-after-another","17":"tag-paul-thomas-anderson","18":"tag-pta","19":"tag-qas","20":"tag-screenings","21":"tag-teyana-taylor","22":"tag-times-like-these"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=162615"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162615\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/162616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=162615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=162615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=162615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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