Is Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest as good as everyone is saying? That it has a run time of nearly three hours and I didn’t drop off, and didn’t have to fight dropping off, may say it all. But if you want more, I can also vouch that One Battle After Another is funny and fantastically propulsive, and it also, I should add, reinvents the car chase – which I don’t believe any of us expected to see in our lifetimes. So while you can search for a deeper meaning if you want (many have), you can also simply enjoy it. (I give you permission.)
The car chase at the end? One of the most thrilling moments in cinema
Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a member of a far-left, anti-capitalist revolutionary group called France 75 and is something of an anomaly, given most of the other members are black women. But he’s accepted and has a girlfriend – fellow group member Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) – who is as much in love with guns, bombs and blowing stuff up as she is with him. When she later becomes pregnant we see how her belly makes a good rifle rest. But for now, we’re alongside them as they attack a detention centre in California to release the immigrant detainees. Here, Perfidia humiliates the centre’s commanding officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Lockjaw does not want to find Perfidia sexually exciting – he is a deranged out-and-out racist – yet he does. He hates himself for it, but not as much as he hates her.
Perfidia and Pat have a baby, a girl, but Perfidia is not cut out for motherhood, and bolts. (Never trust anyone whose name means ‘treacherous’.) Spool forward 16 years and we find Pat – who has changed his name to Bob Ferguson – is now a washed-up pothead, endlessly lying on the couch and barely getting dressed. (DiCaprio puts in some great dressing-gown acting; it’s up there with Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski.) He is wildly protective of his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti; what a name). She, in turn, treats him with affectionate contempt, considers him paranoid – until, that is, Lockjaw comes after her. Lockjaw has his reasons. Yes, indeed.
Based loosely on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, the film rolls a number of stories into one. It’s an action thriller, stoner comedy, screwball adventure. And it’s one battle after another as Pat/Bob seeks to save his daughter. Along the way we encounter a powerful group of white supremacists, a convent of revolutionary nuns, a bounty hunter, mercenaries, former and current France 75 members, and Willa’s martial-arts teacher (Benicio del Toro), who may be the kindest fella that ever lived.
The film never flags, bounding from moments of high tension to ones that are sublime. The comedy, meanwhile, always feels integral. Penn is terrifying as Lockjaw, with a physicality that will put you in mind of Popeye – as if a malevolent Popeye had gone rogue – while DiCaprio brings depth to a character who might otherwise be as simple as Homer Simpson. Taylor is ferocious, practically burning a hole in the screen and although it’s Infiniti’s first major role she more than holds her own.
Anderson always creates his own world, and this one brings you in so completely you may even forget you’re at the cinema. It is entertainment so direct and simple that the need to analyse vaporises. Too cartoonish at times? Possibly. But the car chase at the end? One of the most thrilling moments in cinema.
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