Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson enters the Oscar race with his pulse-pounding action-driven character comedy One Battle After Another, a mixed bag that manages to be greater than the sum of its parts. (Minor spoiler warning, some vague story elements discussed below.)
Leonardo DiCaprio stars in “One Battle After Another.”
Source: Warner
One Battle After Another By the Numbers
One Battle After Another is on track for north of $20 million, and with an A-grade from audiences via Cinemascore the word of mouth is tremendous. There’s room for an all-star cast in a prestige adult action-comedy-drama to do big business through October.
The main challengers will be the rerelease of Avatar: The Way of Water and Roofman in the first half of October, and then Black Phone 2 and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere in the back half of next month. But the audience for One Battle After Another is only likely to feel much competition for its primary demographics from the latter two films, giving One Battle… almost a month to take advantage of its 96% “Fresh” score at Rotten Tomatoes and the strong positive audience buzz.
One Battle After Another Review
One Battle After Another is loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. Anderson adapted Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice to film (you can read my review of that one here), but luckily this new attempt is far better. This is Anderson’s first attempt at action and at such scale, and this is probably his most mainstream project to date. That he succeeds isn’t a surprise, but the material he succeeds with is.
The film looks, feels, and sometimes talks like an unequal mixture of the intimate approach to civil warfare sequences in Uli Edel’s The Baader Meinhof Complex; the political sensibilities of Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah; Spike Lee’s sexual/political commentary and politics in Chi-Raq; Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit navigating citywide protest and government oppression; and the social satire of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood, particularly DiCaprio’s funniest and most self-pitying or anxious scenes (albeit several steps further into parody).
Anderson mostly maintains a kinetic pace to One Battle After Another, including the visual language throughout his scenes, most impressively during an entire extended immigrant community raid in which dramatic events transpire while DiCaprio staggers and crawls and complains his way through the cityscape and social fracture around him.
Forward momentum is crucial to what makes One Battle After Another work, in part because you rarely have time to consider the implications or plausibility of whatever just happened moments before. And rest assured, there’s plenty that doesn’t make sense in the film, and times when the point of what just happened feels murky at best.
In that way, the storytelling reflects the events and an implied truth about life and society and revolution. It holds together because it never slows down enough to fall apart, except when it does slow down at just a couple of junctures and we see on the one hand how important it is to stop a appreciate life and what makes it worth fighting for, but also how hesitation can get you killed. Trusting your instincts and acting decisively save the day, but so does hesitating. Don’t trust anyone, but sometimes take a leap of faith and trust.
The contrast and inconsistency of the very nature of the film’s storytelling and editing, both representing and defying its own point, reflects the film’s deeper commitment to making its point and then also making the point that there’s another point too. This sounds like “both sides” messaging, but also it isn’t – see? The film doesn’t say two things are equal, or equally true, just because both exist.
More to the point, the film notes that sometimes something is true in a moment but not true in general, just as something true in general can cease to be true at a particular moment. Which is to say, sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes bad people do good things, but they are still either a good person or a bad person.
We all experience our own personal battles and inner revolutions. Even the people fighting in a literal armed revolution have their own private wars waged against an internal enemy – and toward an internal goal – only they know and see. How we fight those private battles, and whether they define us, helps determine the person we become within the larger society around us, and within larger revolutions that happen.
The cast of One Battle After Another are superb. Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor (who was spectacular and deserved an Oscar for 2023’s A Thousand and One, which was also the best film of that year), Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, and Regina Hall carry the film easily with their combined talents, and this ensemble combined with its modern relevance, comedic timing, and big-scale action filmmaking elevate the thematic power of the film to make it a success.
While the positives definitely outweigh the problems with the film, it’s worth talking about its weaknesses lie. One of the most important aspects of telling a story is knowing which parts of the story to tell, and Anderson‘s films do a great job of starting out by setting up the characters and their world quickly; but often, it can take quite a long time to actually get to the inciting incident and to what the film is actually going to be about.
90% of the time, Anderson is making brilliant storytelling choices and decisions. However, in those limited occasions when he’s not, the story meanders and feels its way toward where to go next. And life is messy, so often times that’s how things play out for us. In cinema, it can work to lean into the notion a turn of events is what dictates where the story goes next on its own.
But a movie needs to create that impression without letting it actually be the case for the writing. So it does stands out to me when that process didn’t necessarily get everything exactly where it needed to be.
It might’ve been worth starting the film off with Bob and his daughter in present day, and letting us find out what’s going on through her perspective and those current events at first, preserving some of the biggest revelations for the third act where they could land harder for viewer. The chronological ordering undermines some subplots and reveals by making them obvious, and the emotional loss felt by main characters is undermined by what eventually feels like a supercut of Perfidia’s worst actions regarding her family, life, and revolution.
And while I understand the context and meaning behind the villain’s sexual obsession as a reflection of racist and rightwing viewpoints, it also reflects hyper-sexualization of Black women in cinema. Taking on the form of a thing in order to critique and satirize it requires careful and informed perspective. Intentions can result in the opposite of what’s intended, and that’s why our intentions with other people’s lived experiences need to be handled so carefully.
One Battle After Another portrays these themes and reflects these questions and issues in ways that mostly point it out and train all of its satire and disdain for the white men guilty of that gaze, attitude, and behavior. But in going so far into being the thing in order to mock it, sometimes the line gets awfully blurry, and it starts to feel like the film isn’t so much pointing at racist/sexist stereotypes and male gaze as becoming those things in order to provoke us to react.
Anderson has a habit of provoking his audience and seems to relish making viewers uncomfortable. Luckily, One Battle After Another makes it obvious enough what the intent is right out the gate, and the manner of portrayal is over the top enough to come off as satire itself. But there are going to be some viewers who take it at face value and enjoy it for the wrong reasons or become offended, and it’s easy to understand why they took away different messages and feelings about it.
One Battle After Another is a statement about redemption and condemnation, and how those things can and do still exist within complicated and contradictory situations. We know in the film who is definitely redeemable, who definitely isn’t, and who lives somewhere in the middle. The film’s question to us is, which one are you? Which one do you want to be? And what are you willing to do about it?