{"id":22174,"date":"2025-09-17T16:50:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T16:50:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/22174\/"},"modified":"2025-09-17T16:50:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-17T16:50:07","slug":"one-battle-after-another-review-p-t-andersons-mesmerizing-vision","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/22174\/","title":{"rendered":"‘One Battle After Another’ Review: P.T. Anderson’s Mesmerizing Vision"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t\u201cOne Battle After Another<\/a>,\u201d the turbulently powerful and enveloping new movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson<\/a>, is set in an America that\u2019s become a fascist police state: a place where immigrants are rounded up en masse and placed in detention centers, where the police and the military have fused into an implacable authoritarian force, where a hidden cabal of Christian nationalists plan the future from a star chamber, and where a group of ragtag revolutionary guerrillas attempt to disrupt the regime through random bombings and bank robberies. \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a movie that taps down into the fierce urgency of now; it gives you a chill that\u2019s also a wake-up call. Yet when you hear the movie described, it can sound rather aggressive in its dystopian topicality, like a bombs-away, knowingly over-the-top thriller-satire of where we are today and where we might be headed.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe surprise of \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is that while it speaks with a big vision to the danger and anxiety of our moment, it\u2019s also a drama that\u2019s totally grounded and relatable. There\u2019s a thematic heft to it, and the movie is often quite funny in a sidelong way, but it\u2019s not some in-your-face didactic absurdist thing. \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a vision of a society in captivity, but it\u2019s a movie that never loses the pulse of its humanity.<\/p>\n

\n\tAt first we think we\u2019re going to be seeing some elevated action saga of the revolution vs. the regime. Anderson plunges the audience into the rebels\u2019 point of view, immersing us in the recalcitrant pride and swagger of Perfidia Beverly Hills, a revolutionary leader played by Teyana Taylor with a hypnotic sneer of defiance. Perfidia\u2019s partner, in life and revolution, is Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio<\/a>), a scruffy demolitions expert, and as they infiltrate a compound and stage an attack, which the film portrays in all its existential randomness, we may wonder how, exactly, this is going to have much impact on a monolithic government of oppression.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt isn\u2019t. The film\u2019s revolutionaries, who call themselves the French 75, come clothed in the take-no-prisoners rhetoric and fist-in-the-air attitude that\u2019s been the signifier of righteous radicalism since the late \u201960s. But in \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d the actions of the revolutionaries look entirely quixotic \u2014 a tiny eruption of disruption, a tilting at the windmill of dictatorship.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat said, the film spooks us with the question: Is this where America is now heading? Anderson, who built \u201cOnce Battle After Another\u201d around elements he borrowed and reworked from Thomas Pynchon\u2019s 1990 novel \u201cVineland\u201d (which is set during the Reagan era), completed the movie before Donald Trump took office in January 2025, but it\u2019s presented as a knowing projection of what autocracy under the current administration could lead to. The film isn\u2019t just some abstract metaphoric cinematic speculation; it\u2019s designed to look and feel just ahead of the curve of where we\u2019re at now. And since \u201cOnce Battle After Another\u201d is trying to be ruthlessly authentic about how an authoritarian state works, the revolutionaries, it turns out, don\u2019t have much of a chance. Their battle against the government is not what the movie is about.<\/p>\n

\n\tInstead, the film sets up a perversely resonant sort of left-meets-right love triangle. There\u2019s Bob and Perfidia, the outwardly \u201cromantic\u201d revolutionary outlaws. And then there\u2019s the U.S. Army officer who succeeds in apprehending Perfidia: Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, played in a graying military fade, with some fur on top and a martinet scowl, by Sean Penn<\/a>. When we hear the character\u2019s name (Lockjaw!), it seems a cue to giggle, because it\u2019s got such a daffy-metaphorical \u201cStrangelove\u201d vibe. But this is not \u201cStrangelove,\u201d and the key to the character is that Penn, all leathery skin and drawn features and glare of silent boiling dread, is far too great an actor to portray Lockjaw as a cartoon. He gives him a rigid set of military manners and a stern repressed energy that\u2019s a little scary, but we also see the vulnerability he\u2019s working hard to keep a lid on. Lockjaw lusts after Perfidia and spends a secret night with her (putting himself in a passive sexual position), and the result of their ambiguous tryst is that she becomes pregnant. This development introduces the film\u2019s most haunting theme: that even the clashing elements of our society \u2014 warring ideological factions, citizens of different racial backgrounds locked in antagonism \u2014 are actually, underneath it all, deeply and inseparably intertwined.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIs \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d\u2026a drama? Yes, but not entirely. It\u2019s a drama pitched on the hexagonal fault line that conjoins drama and comedy and thriller and allegory and satire and social-political tragedy. It\u2019s all those things at once, and that\u2019s why even when what\u2019s happening is starkly flamboyant, you can\u2019t reduce it in your mind to something less than three dimensions. The film is dotted with close-ups, plugging us into the actors with an intimacy that keeps on giving. And Anderson, working with the cinematographer Michael Bauman, has devised a visual style that\u2019s mesmerizing in its flow, with lavishly detailed images oiled with a dark \u201970s grunge. Each shot carries you along, creating an exhilarating momentum that draws us in emotionally as well.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d has the kind of twists and turns that feed the audience, giving us the childlike sensation that we have no idea what\u2019s coming next, and that that\u2019s the happiest way there is to watch a movie. After Perfidia gives birth to a daughter, Bob, who thinks he\u2019s the father, undergoes a shift of loyalty: from revolution to family. (Perfidia the die-hard rebel does not.) And the way DiCaprio plays this, with a freshly awakened devotion, makes you feel just how personal the movie is. \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is merciless in its depiction of totalitarian clampdown, but Anderson, who has four children with Maya Rudolph, may be more ambivalent about the ideological purity of his revolutionaries than he at first lets on.<\/p>\n

\n\tPenn\u2019s Col. Lockjaw, in love with Perfidia (even though she represents everything he hates), does her a favor by setting her up in an anonymous suburb as part of a witness protection program. But she\u2019s having none of that, and escapes to Mexico. The film then cuts to 16 years later. The revolution is in tatters, and DiCaprio\u2019s Bob, once a celebrity rebel, is now a benignly useless substance-using layabout who tries, in his shambling way, to take care of his and Perfidia\u2019s daughter, Willa (played with a no-nonsense radiance by Chase Infiniti).<\/p>\n

\n\tBut there\u2019s a sinister scheme afoot. Lockjaw has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurers, a secret club of white nationalists, played by actors like Tony Goldwyn and James Downey, who confer great privilege upon their members, but who demand (among other things) racial purity. The group\u2019s name is obviously satirical, but is what we see going on behind their closed doors satirical? That\u2019s for the audience to decide. I\u2019d say that the way these creepy men talk is, at the current moment, too ominously close for comfort to what\u2019s happening off-camera within the current American power structure. It\u2019s a vision of the new agenda. And when Lockjaw, who will do anything to join them, discovers that they may know of his mixed-race child, he sets a kidnap plot in motion that transforms the movie\u2019s second half into a rescue thriller of the most haphazard and exhilarating urgency, with Jonny Greenwood\u2019s modernist musical score pacing the film like a metronome of suspense.<\/p>\n

\n\tDiCaprio, as fine an actor as he can be, has played the aging-baby-face leading man too many times. Anderson knows that the quality that liberates DiCaprio is comedy. By having him play Bob as a dissolute stoner addict, discombobulated by his loss of faith, he humanizes DiCaprio and coaxes a great performance out of him. We\u2019re totally keyed into Bob \u2014 his misplaced valor, his loser karma, the desperate heroics that are rooted in his scuffed decency.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe funniest moment in the movie is when Bob, calling what remains of the rebel underground, can\u2019t remember the code-word answer to \u201cWhat time is it?,\u201d and you can feel how his increasingly impacted frustration at the nitpicking of rebel headquarters stands in for the filmmaker\u2019s perception of everything that has gone wrong in liberal bureaucratic culture. The scene bonds us to Bob, in his plaid bathrobe and wool cap, cueing us to what a blessed ordinary soul he is. And he\u2019s one of an ensemble of rich characters, like Benicio del Toro\u2019s sleepy-eyed sly-dog martial-arts-instructor-turned-revolutionary-adjunct, who are trying to preserve their dream in the middle of a political nightmare. In the film\u2019s ecstatic climactic car chase, where Anderson films the vehicles rolling up and down highway hills like something out of \u201cVanishing Point\u201d as reshot by Michelangelo Antonioni, we see that Bob will go to the ends of the earth for his daughter. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d is a warning, a life-under-autocracy version of Talking Heads\u2019 \u201cLife During Wartime.\u201d It\u2019s also an action-packed allegory of how we got here. Lockjaw\u2019s \u201ctransgression\u201d with Perfidia Beverly Hills takes us back to the hidden comingling of the races that was there at America\u2019s foundation \u2014 that is, the systemic rape of enslaved women by slave holders. The film suggests that the current white-nationalist movement is, in heart, an attempt to separate white and Black people as a primal way of pretending that all that never happened. And that this denial is nothing less than the key fantasy driving the new alt-right America. Bob leaves revolution in the dust to rescue his mixed-race daughter, but the movie says that what he\u2019s doing is the real revolution: finding a family that you fight to hold together; keeping Black and white together, as they long have been; keeping hope alive, in the face of a regime that employs the stifling of hope as a ruling tactic. The movie says that out of this revolt of the everyday a greater revolution will rise.<\/p>\n

\n\tBack in 1997, I considered myself just about the most ardent critical champion of \u201cBoogie Nights,\u201d the then 27-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson\u2019s great drama set in the American porn industry \u2014 a movie that said that the change from film to video in porn embodied the paradigm shift in America from pleasure to addiction, from faith to fear. (I saw it more than 30 times.) \u201cMagnolia\u201d spoke to me too, but since then I have never fully connected with Anderson\u2019s work, finding his movies, even upon repeat viewings, to be cryptic (\u201cThe Master\u201d), didactic (\u201cThere Will Be Blood\u201d), precious (\u201cPunch-Drunk Love\u201d), contrived (\u201cLicorice Pizza\u201d), overly tailored (\u201cPhantom Thread\u201d), or just plain wacked (\u201cInherent Vice\u201d). \u201cOne Battle After Another\u201d marks the first time in 26 years I\u2019ve watched a Paul Thomas Anderson film that I felt was inviting me into its world as passionately as the film was creating it. You could say I\u2019ve now come back to being an Anderson believer, but the way I\u2019d put it is this: After years of overly determined theatrics, he has gone back to being a master.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d the turbulently powerful and enveloping new movie written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22175,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[146,85,46,5433,397,5434,5435,7219],"class_list":{"0":"post-22174","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-israel","11":"tag-leonardo-dicaprio","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-one-battle-after-another","14":"tag-paul-thomas-anderson","15":"tag-sean-penn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22174"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22174\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}