Paul Thomas Anderson is a director who has grown on me significantly within the past few years. I've always described his movies as "intense", "aggressive", "masculine", and "off-putting".
Now, a faithful reader of my reviews might point out, "But Jenny, aren't all your favorite movies intense, aggressive, masculine, and off-putting?" and I would have to admit that, yes, many of them are. I prefer horror to rom-coms, hard-R films to family friendly ones, and movies that have me on the edge of my seat rather than relaxed back into the couch. So, what's my issue with Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA)?
Well, PTA's movies are just...different than the other aggressive, masculine movies I like. For example, I LOVE movies directed by Quentin Tarantino. But unlike PTA, Tarantino's movies are slick and cheeky. Even if you're not a fan of violent movies, you might find yourself won over by Kill Bill or Pulp Fiction. They're funny and clever enough to provide entry points to movie watchers of a more delicate sensibility. QT's movies are also just cool. PTA strikes me as a director who doesn't really care about being "cool". His movies are like the weird guy at the party talking to you about the Hinterkaifeck murders a little too loudly. You want to back away slowly, even if the conversation is kind of interesting.
The other thing about PTA's movies are that they are unapologetically emotional, but in a really chaotic way. His movies make me get that lump in the throat feeling (a good example is the scene in Boogie Nights where Mark Wahlberg's mom basically beats him and calls him stupid as he begs "Please don't be mean to me!" It's heartbreaking!)...but unlike movies that bring you to emotional heights and then gently bring you down, PTA just lets you crash to the ground. So there are real tearjerker moments in nearly all his films, but they are not heartwarming.
Getting back to my point...I feel like I needed to achieve a certain amount of emotional maturity to enjoy PTA's movies. Boogie Nights freaked me the fuck out when I first saw it around age 15 and now it's in my top ten films of all time. The crude and abrasive sexuality was disgusting to me as a teenager (which is a good thing!) and now it's just funny to me. Similarly, I rewatched Magnolia recently and I appreciated it as a deeply emotional and intimate film whereas when I first saw it I was just like "this is way too much".
So I went into PTA's latest film, One Battle After Another, prepared to be put off by it. And while it is certainly aggressive and intense and masculine, it was also an absolute blast. It's exhilarating in way that makes you feel alive--I was vibrating with excitement in my movie theatre seat. It's also really funny and really heartfelt. In this film, PTA returns to one of his favorite themes: fatherhood. So many of his films feature family dynamics that are very upsetting (see the above-mentioned scene from Boogie Nights) with parents or parental figures using, abusing, or just plain hating their children. One Battle After Another shows a father who is imperfect and lax, but whose devotion to his daughter comes before all else.
The plot is this: Teyana Taylor and Leonardo DiCaprio play Perfida Beverly Hills and "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun--members of the leftist revolutionary group the French 75. This group engages in acts of terrorism and political subversion: they blow up banks, fuck with the power grid, and free detained immigrants. Perfida and Pat become lovers and have a child together, Charlene. But when Perfida kills a man in a botched bank heist, she informs on the other members of the French 75 to avoid thirty years in prison.
Oh, Perfida also has a questionably consensual relationship with a military officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) and it's unclear who is using who in that situation. She initially uses her sexuality to dominate and humiliate Lockjaw, but he comes back into her life demanding, well, more nookie in exchange for not arresting her and turning her in. It's unclear how many times these two meet up, but they have sex at least once...which calls Charlene's paternity into question.
Pat and baby Charlene go into hiding under new names: Bob and Willa Ferguson. Various members of the French 75 are killed, and Perfida leaves the United States for Mexico.
Cut to 16 years later. Bob has morphed into a less chill version of Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski: he gets high all the time, hangs out in his bathrobe, and is very paranoid. Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti in an excellent breakout performance) is a self-assured teen who pretty much has to parent Bob.
Steven Lockjaw is a Colonel now and is interested in membership in a secret society called "The Christmas Adventurers"--a deeply, deeply, deeply racist group of incredibly wealthy white men. In order to become a member, Lockjaw can have no history of anything that a white supremacist group would look askance at. That includes possibly being the father of a biracial child.
Lockjaw knows that Willa might be his child. He dispatches troops to the city where Bob and Willa live. It's a heavily Hispanic city filled with immigrants, so he uses the guise of an immigration raid to find and Bob and Willa. He tells his men to kill Bob if they find him. If they find Willa, Lockjaw will test her paternity and kill her if her existence threatens his possible membership in this little Klan Klub.
Luckily, the French 75 get wind of this plan when one of their members is arrested and gives up information. The members are able to get Willa to safety, and Bob only barely escapes a raid on his house. When he calls the French 75 hotline, he cannot remember the passcode and therefore is not told the rendezvous point. So he has to ask Sergio (Benicio del Toro), Willa's karate instructor, and a "Latino Harriet Tubman" who helps undocumented immigrants, for help.
So begins a wild goose chase with incredibly high stakes. One Battle After Another lives up to its title because the action does not stop. The film is both very tense and very funny...and ultimately very emotional. Willa is captured by Lockjaw and forcibly subjected to a paternity test. She says to him "It doesn't matter what that test says. I have a father and it's not you." My heart. And when Willa and Bob are reunited after a tense (and very satisfying) car chase sequence, it is pure love.
One Battle After Another has faced its share of criticism. A couple criticisms I agree with are the fact that for a movie with a very diverse cast, two white men are essentially the main characters and we follow their stories for most of the movie. Also, the film uses the very timely and serious issue of immigration and hatred of immigrants as a convenient backdrop to the actual plot of the film which is about a man trying to save his daughter. The film is very pro-immigrant and anti-cop and military, so I don't think any malice is intended, but One Battle After Another is basically playing leftist dress-up rather than being about leftist or radical ideas.
I also saw some criticism saying that the film is sexist and "both sides are bad". I see where that criticism is coming from, but I don't think this is a "both sides" movie at all. I think the movie presents one side as evil and the other as imperfect. If anything, the right-wing bad guys were too evil and would have felt cartoonish 20 years ago (now they feel like they'd fit right in at a dinner with Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth).
All this said, I think it's pretty remarkable that One Battle After Another, a film about violent and militant left-wing resistance, exists in this current moment. I saw that Ben Shapiro released a video criticizing it, but I'm kind of surprised I haven't heard more right-wing commentators raising a stink about it, especially after the stink they raised about The Hunt five years ago. One Battle After Another portrays the military and the cops as not just bad, but actively subverting the law and threatening and manipulating people into giving information. They portray them as evil, racist torturers and murderers. Bond villains, basically! I don't know if I've seen a film so clearly anti-cop/military in the theatre before! Maybe I'm just a basic bitch who hasn't watched enough leftist cinema, but it seemed pretty damn impressive to me.
One more thing to mention before I wrap up: the acting is phenomenal in this film. This is one of my favorite Leo performances ever, on par with The Wolf of Wall Street. Leo can be a bit hit or miss for me, but when he gets loose, he really shines. Sean Penn is also great! I pretty much hate Sean Penn as both an actor and a person (he's a known piece of shit), but he was really great as a villain who is both scary and ridiculous. PTA always manages to wring wonderful performances out of actors who I hate both as actors and as people (Mark Wahlberg and Tom Cruise being two other examples).
Overall, damn, this is one of the best movies I've seen this year. It's definitely the best movie-watching experience I've had this year, meaning that I was pumped the entire time. I was having to stop myself from pulling out my phone in the theatre and texting people about it (because that would have been an asshole move), which is a sign that I was REALLY FUCKING ENJOYING IT. Finally, PTA made a movie that didn't have to grow on me...I just straight up loved it the first time I watched it.
Grade: A
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