Directed By Paul Thomas Anderson

Starring – Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro

The Plot – Bob (DiCaprio) is a washed-up revolutionary who lives in a state of stoned paranoia, surviving off-grid with his spirited and self-reliant daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti). When his evil nemesis (Penn) resurfaces and Willa goes missing, the former radical scrambles to find her as both father and daughter battle the consequences of their pasts.

Rated R for pervasive language, violence, sexual content, and drug use

One Battle After Another | Official Trailer 2

POSITIVES

Certain directors have the unlimited capability of transcending both genres and the three act structure of conventional storytelling, and that certainly pertains to Anderson, who here in his first film since 2021’s “Licorice Pizza”, commands the screen with the kind of captivating influence that grabs ahold of audiences for nearly three hours of a runtime, yet somehow has them asking for more by the triumphant end of it. It’s a story overwhelmingly appraised by humanity, not only in the timely relevant themes and conflicts that it casually sifts through towards crafting the director’s most personably accessible film to date, full of radiant personality and charming character cadence during its intoxicatingly absorbing interactions, but also one that revels in the vitality of mirroring a world like our own that is urgently burning at the seams, yet finds graceful optimism in the empowering value of community and societal togetherness that proves any systematic oppression is capably overcome with the truth in such overwhelming numbers. While you would expect a script pertaining to racist and xenophobic struggles, generational adversity, and revolutionary activism to feel heavy handed with its social commentary, or at the least overwhelmed by the limitless ambition that Anderson has in stitching together so many unique talking points, the film surprisingly transitions seamlessly throughout the entirety of this cross-generational odyssey, with an immaculate edit from Andy Jurgensen that allows arcs and development to flow breezily with the kind of requited urgency that enacts audiences to get lost in the complex details of character actions, even without fully abiding to neat and packaged resolutions, and while Anderson appraises importance to each tension-building moment, even taking intricate value in the subdued moments between confrontation that elicit some of that expected Anderson quirkiness, it’s the rawness and uncertainty factors of his articulated environments that help produce these resounding impacts that never relent, combining stakes and sentiment towards empathizing so many dangerous characters, even without entirely justifying the extent of their sometimes questionable motives of oppressive reprieve. In terms of technique, Anderson is given a lot of help behind the lens, with cinematographer Michael Bauman making the seamless transition from lighting technician to conjure something hypnotically entrancing and cerebral, with how effortless he weaves and documents in and around so many dangerously daring set pieces. As to where most action movies revel in the safety and sanitized appeal of computer generation, there’s a fearlessness to Anderson’s orchestration of chase and crash sequences that feels boldly daring and immersive towards blurring the lines of comfort and safety that the screen divides to the audience, and with Bauman binging on the garnered intensity of many audacious camera placements and inevitable confrontations, he’s able to keep us on the edge of our seats throughout so much gravitational uncertainty, when he isn’t seducing us with the bends and hills of a road within so much featured desert scenery, enacting three-dimensional tangibility that is typically reserved at a distance for Anderson productions. On top of this, “One Battle After Another” also wields with it another eager opportunity to indulge in the perfect partnership of Anderson and his trusty composer, Jonny Greenwood, who with a piano and some slight deviations in a unnervingly unraveling series of jazzy compositions, attaches such unconventional tones to accommodating sequences, serving as another ingredient to the stew of uncertainty that Anderson is constantly stirring to a famished audience. The best of these is easily in the tone heard throughout the movie’s marketing trailers, which not only patiently persists impressively through what feels like twenty minutes of one second act sequence, featuring an initialized strumming of a single note that grows all the more expansive and rhythmic with each passing second, but also garners so much psychological complexity in the actions and depths of its characters, almost feeling like an unrelenting conscious that none of them can outrun. There’s also many praises to be given to the performances featuring one of the year’s most expansively gifted ensembles, offering plenty of awards opportunities to both grizzled veterans and promising newcomers to the scene. For my money, Sean Penn steals the show as a seedy commanding officer to the military who is quite literally erected at the possibility of oppressing cultures who don’t meet his idealized idea of what society should be. Penn’s leathery sliminess could easily come across as cartoonish and compromising to a scene’s tonal elasticity, if done with even a degree of overreliance on theatrics, however his emotional instability and ferocity are never sacrificed for his indulgently humiliating tactics towards his opposition, and because of such we get what is easily Penn’s best work since “Mystic River”, and one that I’m confident will earn him his third Oscar in a prestigious career. Leonardo DiCaprio is also a lot of fun as Bob, but not in the ways that you would expect from a DiCaprio performance, instead opting for more of the unconfidently anxious side to inspiring revolutionaries that doesn’t always make him the most stoically strong of protagonists, yet does afford him the same level of authenticity and commitment to character that he has maintained in his approach to such wildly eclectic characters, producing a barrel of unforeseen laughs for the engagement that are dependably effective because of the eccentric responses that he gives to so much situational disappointment. Last but not least, Chase Infiniti’s big screen debut is one full of toughness, vulnerability, and captivating confidence to every scene that she’s involved, allowing her to hold her own against a dream team opposition of cinematic heavyweights, even with the least amount of screen time between them. Infiniti isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty during a tense third act that requires her to think fast and shield devastation, but her best moments are those pertaining to the stirring sentimentality between her and Bob, that conjure an embrace towards affection that squashes Anderson’s usual dependency upon cynicism, in turn cementing this as the first step in an inevitable career full of her own deserved acclaim.

NEGATIVES

While there’s very little about Anderson’s latest to keep it from being my second favorite film of his, there are some glaring aspects of distraction that ultimately keep it from being the flawless perfection that many have celebrated it as, particularly with a screenplay with bouts of imbalance to its logic and patience. On the latter, the first act of the movie feels noticeably rushed and underdeveloped towards the initial objective of this rebel group of renegades breaking into this determent camp, dropping us into the heat of the conflict without anything even remotely resembling a backstory on the who’s or why’s of this obviously racial-driven conflict. One could certainly pull together enough clues in the kind of camps from our own world, especially in the physical evidence that appears without being faithfully focused on, but for my money I wish that this, as well as the following development between Bob, Perfidia, and Willa, was given more of the 157 minute runtime, in order to give us a tighter grasp on the characters before they’re thrown in some heavily empathized moments requiring emotionality, especially considering it took me slightly longer to get invested to such familiar themes that should come natural to me. As for the lapses in logic, there’s one particular plot device introduced early on that was predictably orchestrated during the film’s third act, but my problem with it actually persists in this object remaining by the wayside of a particular character who possessed it, even in eventually being captured supposedly without search by the authorities pursuing them. If you’re naive enough to think that racist armed forces would be stupid enough to bring in a black character without searching her, then this won’t be a problem for you, but it’s something that ultimately made me audibly groan during the movie’s climax, serving as the one instance where I was reminded that this was a movie, even with Anderson’s rawness and spontaneity appraising so much uncertainty to its most decorated moments.

OVERALL
“One Battle After Another” is an unsettling and urgent window into society’s plaguing of racist oppression, made endearingly entertaining with the level of mesmerizing provocativeness that pits Paul Thomas Anderson near the front of the best filmmaker in the world category. Featuring a superb ensemble, striking visuals, and thematic impulses that garner a lot of reality to the escapism typically ushered in with the silver screen, the film is an unblinking odyssey running nearly three hours that is among the most important films of the year, and one that hopefully inspires change in the numbers of togetherness that are sadly missing in such a divisive world

My Grade: 9.1 or A