I was not in a hurry to get this review out. I wanted to take my time with it, and absorb some of the context around it. I had no real angle to write from.
A couple years ago I had a silly idea to do a themed series covering the career of PT Anderson, except I would pretend PT was the same filmmaker as Paul WS Anderson.
This is the movie where it feels like their respective paths could converge. Kind of.
In light of the recent news about the Warner Brothers sale, writing about One Battle After Another gained a new layer of pathos. If this merger goes through, the results will not be good.
In its pieces, this movie has the heart of exploitation cinema: A band of radical women activists hiding out as nuns; Teyana Taylor is styled as an action heroine, complete with - at one point - a massive machine gun.
But all of these elements are surface. What the movie is ultimately about is taking these images of rebellion and revolution and breaking them down, showing the ways in which real change is accomplished without the overt heroics (and implied individualism) the early scenes present - instead it is the less glamorous work, of ongoing interpersonal relationships and community-building, which can cause the most important shifts.
While it is based on a novel (which I have not read) this movie is so primed for 2025 America.
Underneath the action scenes and comedy, there is a throbbing pulse of rage to the movie - a righteous anger at the state of the world, and the foundational sins of the country that still carries so much weight.
It did not help that before the screening I had watched the footage of an immigrant woman being tackled by an ICE agent outside a courtroom - a brutal display of state violence. The film’s focus on white supremacy and immigration carried an extra charge.
The film is split into two halves:
In the first half, we follow the revolutionary group Paris 76 in their youth, directly engaging the government (freeing immigrants from a Denton centre; leaving bombs in government buildings; robbing banks).
In the second, we are dropped into the present, as DiCaprio’s “Bob”, paranoid and disillusioned, tries to raise his daughter according to the principles he lived by with his old comrades.
Teyana Taylor, so impressive in Three Thousand and One, is the deceptively solid sun around which the first part of the film orbits.
She is a mythic figure, an archetype of a strong black woman. Highly sexual AND physically imposing, she feels like a descendant of Pam Grier’s action heroines of the seventies.
She seems like the perfect embodiment of the white establishment’s fears and desires - as well as her partners’.
In the early scenes I was a little disconcerted - I thought she was a bit too broad.
But that image turns out to be a lie - in the end, she is just a human being, as flawed and capable of failure as anyone else.
It is a shocking, brutal reveal. And it plays to the film’s broader focus on the difference between people who play with a belief system, and those who do the work, make the sacrifice to embody it.
DiCaprio’s Pat/Bob is the positive inverse of his role in Killers of the Flower Moon - whereas that film presented him as an antagonist who is capable of recognising his own moral failings, but too weak to rise above them.
Here he is playing a character who initially tries to be an ally and work against the institutions which are designed for him, but when the film jumps forward in time, he has given that up. The most he will do is performative (offering a (correct) analysis of the US presidents during a parent-teacher meeting).
Ultimately he does not become the film’s hero - and he saves no one.
As his daughter Charlene, Chase Infiniti is a welcome balance - she spends most of the movie apart from her father, and the actress more than holds her own against heavyweights like Sean Penn and Regina Hall.
Sean Penn’s emotionally stunted, childish soldier is both terrifying and pathetic, while the club he worships are both all-powerful and ridiculous, capable of great damage but unable to quash dissent or destroy the communities they are seeking to eradicate.
It is a performance of tics but it works for a man struggling to find a channel for his own desires - until he finds the perfect avatar in Taylor’s Perfidia.
One performance that has thankfully not gone unnoticed is Regina Hall - as one of Bob/Pat’s comrades who comes to rescue Charlene, she delivers the most understated yet nuanced portrayal in the film. She is almost in a different movie from the more heightened characters around her, yet she also grounds it.
There is a scene toward the end, where she has to make a choice, which is the most emotionally devastating in the film. And that recognition is delivered purely in her face. It is a fantastic showcase for an actress who seems to be capable of anything (is Scary Movie 6 something I should review?).
This movie earns its 162 min runtime, and it is built for IMAX. The final meeting between Lockjaw and the bounty hunter in the desert is breathtaking.
One of the best movies of the year.
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