A scene from One Battle After Another, courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
“The White guys don’t come across very well,” a friend told me as we left the theater after One Battle After Another, the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson.
I’ll say. To begin with, the two male leads, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, look awful, the result not just of makeup and age but also the VistaVision that the film is shot in, a 35mm high-resolution format that captures every crag and sag.
Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) is not exactly admirable. He proved competent enough as a radical-leftist bombmaker, back in the day, not to blow up himself, his comrades, or apparently others along with targeted infrastructure and buildings. But in that role he was bossed around by a Black revolutionary, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), with whom he haplessly and one-sidedly fell in love. She cheated on him and left, and he has chosen to drop out of the movement and raise their daughter, Willa (the excellent Chase Infiniti), alone. That loving responsibility makes the character more sympathetic as a result, but over the years Bob has devolved into a self-medicating mess. When stressed—even by something as small as a parent-teacher conference—he reveals that he is a dipstick, prone to panic and therefore anger. He is saved through the rest of the film largely by Black and brown people, including Willa, who is forced by circumstances to be the adult.
Sean Penn seems to be channeling George C. Scott, in his role as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, a corrupt Marine (I guess) MP officer in charge of an immigrant detention facility, and later some sort of interagency intelligence operative. As a rabid White supremacist, he is of course sexually obsessed with Perfidia and genetically obsessed with Willa. He runs amok for as long as he does because White authorities choose to be blind to his unsound methods, and because a silly group of White Illuminati, who call themselves The Christmas Adventurers Club, are inept.
The most frightening “White guys who come across badly” are the beefy, rough bullies in sweaty tactical gear who are always at the door. They use jargon to sound more professional—euphemisms such as “going kinetic” for violent entry—but their unit patches, already hard to see in olive drab, mean nothing. Are they soldiers, Marines, spec-op sailors? Police? Mercenaries? It is impossible to tell. These are the “defenders” of the American homeland, deployed to sanctuary cities to punish immigrants and anyone else who deplores the troops’ presence. Are they even in service to the authorities? Who knows who the authorities are? The sense of a bigger nation is mostly absent in the film, except that its chief industry appears to be racialization, and it is a state rich in corruption and punitive technology.
One quick scene struck me as particularly contemporary: A Blackhawk full of federalized blitzkrieg troops (their ballistic vests reading “Police,” though they look like SEALs in Afghanistan) are inbound on a mission. The doors of the chopper are open, the rotor-wash and breeze is in their faces, and the men are relaxed, as if on a joy ride. They might as well be, since they are going up against people with no real defenses, including young students and families with infants. My first thought was, “Chicago,” and my second was that this is a new, doublespeak meaning of the term “asymmetrical warfare.”
Paul Thomas Anderson is said to have been working on this film for many years, going back to an intended film adaptation of Pynchon’s Vineland. Perhaps as a result, One Battle After Another is a bit of a mishmash, its images combining raids, detention centers, tent cities, and holding pens of recent years, with bombings and bank robberies in the style of militants in the ’60s. Mercenary encampments and running gun battles on the roads feel post-apocalyptic.
The film reportedly finished shooting by July 2024. Because Anderson could not know who would be in office in 2025, or what events would occur this year, he got somewhat lucky that the news has partially caught up, and the film can be marketed as having more relevant social commentary. Anderson’s films always have dark humor, but I have to think he may have felt a greater need to signal satire back then, which plays a little unevenly now.
The heroes of One Battle include Willa, a mixed-race young woman; an older Native American contract killer who chooses to be on the side of those without power; and Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio Del Toro, exhibiting the insouciance of his character Fenster in The Usual Suspects, all those years ago), who runs a bodega, karate dojo, and underground railroad stop for the undocumented. Everyone calls him “Sensei.” Not once does he use violence to achieve his goals, which include a happy ending of sorts for people trying to have normal lives like anybody else.
