It’s the end of the year and it’s time to take stock. Or, if you’re like me, it’s time to curl up and let the universe happen to you.
This is my response to one of the best movies about America that came out this year; I just let One Battle After Another happen to me.
Kind of like the news, and the warming weather, and the grocery prices, and the interest rates, Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest movie, which just hit HBO streaming recently, hits you over the head and doesn’t stop.
I don’t mean that in a bad way. There is a timeless quality to PTA, as fans call him, when he is at his best. One Battle After Another features topics we must regularly contend with – immigration, racism, the politics of who is and isn’t “legal”, leftist radicalism, sexual obsession, what it means to love someone in a forever fragmenting world, what we give up and what we gain when we have children. It could have easily been set in the 1970s.
The story and how it makes you feel is what matters, not who’s currently in office.
People ask “What is America?” when they think it has a simple answer: it’s a fascist empire! It’s a gluttonous consumer hell! etc.
Whatever you think of America, this country dictates. It mass produces style. The Western is one of its coolest styles, and One Battle After Another co-opts elements of the Western to a fantastic effect.
There is action, and drama, and philosophy, but it’s all very laconic. Drenched in pale sunlight. Wry. A smile on cracked lips.
Pat/Bob is a broken down and exhausted former revolutionary played by Leonardo Dicaprio, who’s fully in his The Dude from Big Lebowski era here. He must save his daughter Willa – Chase Infiniti in a star-making turn – from harm and reckon with his past.
Teyana Taylor is iconic as the girl’s radical mother, who makes a deal with the devil following her arrest. Sean Penn shows up as a “soldier boy” turned white supremacist, and an avatar of many ways in which American masculinity struggles against itself today. Benicio del Toro is hilarious as a martial arts instructor with a secret life and the capacity to be the kind of man you turn to when shit hits the fan.
One of the primary drives behind revolution is the idea that we must make the world better for our kids. And then we tend to find out that we have to play along with the world if we are to keep our children alive, at least for a while. Until they may no longer need us.
There is defeat in that, but there is also wisdom.
It’s a conundrum, and it can even be a humorous one, as PTA repeatedly shows us.
One Battle After Another would get weighed down by its own stylishness and contemplative view of American life if it wasn’t also a damn funny movie. Even Sean Penn’s walk is hilarious.
There is a lunatic energy to American life that PTA has been capturing for decades. In some ways, at least to me, One Battle After Another feels like a spiritual sequel to Magnolia, another cinematic labyrinth of loathing and love.
Except in the year 2025, people are being snatched on the streets and helicopters whirr overhead, and the stakes feel too high. Pat/Bob is easily identified with, even if you don’t have a radical past to speak of, because he’s just trying to keep it together in the churn.
It isn’t always helpful, and sometimes he is weird and cringe, but that’s what being a parent is.
One of the most emotional moments in One Battle After Another happens when Willa has to leave the school dance with Deandra (Regina Hall), one of Pat/Bob’s old revolutionary sidekicks. Her pretty blue skirt swaying, she is forced to run as her classmates are dancing to Walk the Moon. Police cars are already screeching up to the building. The lights turn on in the gym, the happy music stops.
We all have to grow up sometime – but the cost is steeper to some.
So at the end of this year, a grievous and dark and also beautiful year, along with Sinners and Babygirl and 28 Years Later, One Battle After Another is a reminder that no matter what happens, we will continue to tell some great fucking stories.
Read Mark Farnsworth’s review of One Battle After Another here.