What, Exactly, Is <em>One Battle After Another </em>About? Seeing It Twice Provided Some Answers.
If you’re confused about what’s going on in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, don’t worry: so is its hero, addled ex-revolutionary Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). In the movie’s present, which is never precisely identified but looks and feels a lot like now (Bob says he’s 42 and was born “somewhere in the ’80s”), Bob is a rumpled single dad living off the grid, trying his best to raise his 16-year-old daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), without fully understanding the world she inhabits. But even in the past, where he and Willa’s mother (Teyana Taylor) are part of a militant group called the French 75, he’s at something of a loss. As his comrade and lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills, preps the group’s members for a raid on an immigrant detention facility, a befuddled Bob is just trying to keep up. “I’m a little unclear what the plan is,” he squeaks. “I need some direction.”
You could describe the nearly three hours of movie that follows in many ways; as a knockabout satire or a political broadside or, as Anderson put it after a screening this week, “an action comedy with a side of postpartum depression.” But one way to think of it is as one man’s epic journey to figure out just what the hell is going on. Bob—or Pat Calhoun, as he is known back in his radical days—isn’t a hanger-on, exactly, but it’s telling that his specialty is making bombs that are set to go off in unoccupied buildings. During the opening raid, he hangs back as Perfidia storms into the compound and sets off fireworks that turn their local action into a larger spectacle—like Anderson, it’s his job to put on a show. Meanwhile, Perfidia comes face to face with Sean Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, holding him at gunpoint while she announces just what the French 75 stands for: “Free borders, free bodies, free choices, and free from fucking fear.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Perfidia is also the one who gets caught, after a bank robbery goes horribly awry. (Although Anderson has moved Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, on which One Battle is very loosely based, forward in time by several decades, he’s still clearly drawing on the real-life history of groups like the Weather Underground and the Symbionese Liberation Army.) That leaves Bob to raise their daughter in hiding, perpetually afraid that the authorities may one day catch up with them. His paranoia is based in fact, especially after several of his former comrades are shot dead in the street, but it has a way of feeding on itself, and the fact that he’s always on some sort of drug certainly doesn’t help matters. It’s unclear how much Willa knows about her parents’ past, but she doesn’t seem to have inherited their revolutionary fervor, and the distinction between Bob’s justified caution and standard paternal overprotectiveness is elusive to them both. When he grills her friends at the door of their house, a bare-bones shack nestled deep in the forest, is he looking out for her safety, or is he just a dad whose little girl is growing up faster than he can adjust?
Anderson himself is no revolutionary, and he’s rarely shown much interest in political, or topical, filmmaking. The closest he’s come to radicalism is emulating a famous long take from the Communist propaganda film I Am Cuba in his porn-industry fantasia Boogie Nights. But he is, like DiCaprio’s character, the father of a biracial daughter—Anderson has four children with the actress Maya Rudolph—and the movie is rooted in Bob’s deep-seated determination to do right by his child while struggling to grasp what that actually means. An avowed Pynchon fan who already adapted the author’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2014, Anderson spent two decades tinkering with the script for what became One Battle After Another. But he said it wasn’t until he became a father that he began to understand what his version of the story would be about—and indeed, the relationship between a middle-aged radical and his daughter is nearly the only element of Pynchon’s novel he retains. The movie isn’t even officially an adaptation of the book: Per the credits, it’s merely “inspired by” it.
Bob means well, of course. But his enforced isolation has turned his revolutionary fervor into a kind of nostalgia for struggles past. While Willa is out at her school dance, he’s at home smoking a joint and watching The Battle of Algiers. Before the dance, Willa’s friends drop by to pick her up, and as one approaches the front door, Bob anxiously quizzes her on their pronouns. But rather than appreciate her father’s interest, Willa heaves the heaviest of sighs, even as her dad insists he’s just trying to be “polite.” (As the Gen X father of a Gen Z daughter, I can testify firsthand to the waves of frustration that such a query can generate; it wouldn’t surprise me if the exchange in Anderson’s movie was transcribed verbatim.) Bob wants Willa to see how hard he’s trying, but he knows he’s always a few steps behind, and there are things about the world she exists in that he’ll never be equipped to teach her. In a rare moment of self-reflection amid the movie’s frenzied chaos, he laments that he never even learned how to do her hair.
One Battle After Another is a massive, sprawling epic, but it moves at a furious pace, and although it includes shootouts and a bona fide car chase, much of the key action takes place offscreen. Anderson’s screenplay is immaculately structured, but unless you’re particularly attentive to the dialogue, it can feel like a movie in which things simply just happen. My sense is that Anderson wants you, like Bob, to feel like you’re struggling just to keep your head above water—this is, after all, the defining tone of Pynchon’s novels—which is why so many key lines are couched in in-group argot, as if we’re eavesdropping on a conversation that isn’t intended for us. Willa’s martial arts teacher (Benicio Del Toro) doesn’t tell Bob that he’s helping to bring migrants into the country; he says he’s involved in a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation.” And while the movie doesn’t bury the actors’ words the way Christopher Nolan does, the sound mix definitely favors naturalism over clarity. Which is all to say that while you can nail down a cause for every effect, Anderson seems fine with letting the audience sit back and enjoy the ride—you can figure it out, but you don’t have to.
That lightness of touch also allows Anderson to salt his movie with allusions to the contemporary political climate without tying it to any specific incident, or even any specific administration. Images of children playing with crumpled-up Mylar blankets inside a chain-link pen evoke the horrors of child separation, and the opening shot of the wall on the U.S.–Mexico border feels like a direct allusion to Trump’s immigration crackdown, but the time jump serves as an implicit reminder the wall’s first segments were constructed under President Bill Clinton, and that Obama deported more people than Trump. The last nine years may have brought the country’s uglier elements closer to the surface, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there before.
The movie’s most ingenious invention is also its most absurd. At the heart of its darkness is a shadowy group called the Christmas Adventurers Club, whose flagrantly silly name belies its sinister agenda. Although one member—played, in an understated casting coup, by the legendary Saturday Night Live writer Jim Downey—describes their enemies as “dangerous lunatics, haters, and punk trash,” they are quite plainly white supremacists, determined to empower their race and disenfranchise the rest, at least when it’s not practical to purge them altogether. If Tony Goldwyn, who plays Virgil Throckmorton, one of the club’s higher-ups, isn’t reprising his role as Scandal’s conspiracy-plagued commander in chief, the movie certainly allows you to look at one and see the other, even as he’s talking about the need to make the world “safe and pure” or quizzing a prospective Christmas Adventurer about whether they are “American-born, by Gentile.” Penn’s Col. Lockjaw, who barks out orders about rounding up “wet and stinkies,” is more crudely racist, more nakedly driven by his baser urges. But there’s something more chilling about the way Goldwyn can issue a cryptic directive about “drugs and tacos” and just assume, correctly, that the others around can correctly divine his malicious intent. They don’t need to have anything explained to them, because they’re the ones who dictate how the world operates.
Sometimes the meaning of their words becomes clear. At others, as when Virgil tosses off a reference to a half-Comanche mercenary who served the group well at something called “Squatting Pebble,” we’re left to speculate. The parallel to the Standing Rock protests is easy enough, but is he suggesting that his agent infiltrated the movement in order to undermine it—and if so, is Anderson implying that the same thing happened in the real world? By the time we’re done processing all of this, a conspiratorial allegation wrapped inside a bit of goofy wordplay, the movie has long since moved on, and we never circle back. It took me two viewings just to catch what Goldwyn was saying, and I’m sure there are other pieces of the puzzle that flew right by me. People tend to reserve the term “worldbuilding” for more fantastical settings, but One Battle After Another takes place in a fully imagined cosmos, even if the film’s text only exposes us to slivers of it. We always have the sense that there’s something bigger just outside the frame, beyond our ability to comprehend it. If it doesn’t play like a conspiracy thriller, that’s only because most of its characters have no idea there’s any conspiracy to unravel.
As befits a movie set in the 21st century, everything in One Battle After Another is a few degrees removed from its source. The French 75 is a revolutionary group named for a cocktail named for a piece of artillery; Bob Ferguson was once Ghetto Pat, aka Pat Calhoun, aka the Rocketman. That reproduction breeds obscurity, the way a copy of a copy grows blurrier with every generation. But it’s also a form of lineage, a history of meaning, of ideals, of struggle, passed on from one generation to the next: one battle after another. The fight is never won, but it also can’t be lost, at least not forever. We take from those before, and we pass on what we can, knowing that one lifetime isn’t enough to understand everything wrong with this world, let alone to figure out how to make a better one.
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