One Battle After Another

For the devoted cinephile, every new Paul Thomas Anderson movie is an event. Yet, given our fraught social and political climate, this screw-loose political thriller inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland—as well as Anderson’s first feature to be set in our contemporary world since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love—had been anticipated with an especially unique fervor. What kind of vision would one of our greatest filmmakers, who has long chronicled various turbulent periods from our tumultuous past century, reveal when he turns his lens to our anxious present moment? Despite the enormous hype, One Battle After Another proved every bit as moving and riveting as one could hope. A monumental achievement unanimously praised by critics and audiences alike, it was also hailed by many as not only Anderson’s most thrilling and entertaining work to date, but perhaps the most significant American studio film of its decade. A modern masterpiece that captures the zeitgeist of the 2020s as effectively as New Hollywood classics like Chinatown, Nashville, and Network did for the 1970s.

One Battle After Another begins in rousing fashion as Teyana Taylor’s gorgeous and feisty Black Power revolutionary Perfida Beverly Hills leads a squad of left-wing radicals in liberating a migrant detention facility and the resulting tension and excitement barely lets up during its nearly three-hour runtime. The film eventually segues to the perspective of Bob Ferguson: Perfida’s ex-lover and a former anti-fascist revolutionary turned washed-up pothead dad played by Leonardo DiCaprio, subverting his movie star image to shaggy dog perfection. After 16 years of hiding, Bob must revert back to his old life to save his biracial teenage daughter from Sean Penn’s absolutely unhinged Colonel Steven Lockjaw, a fascist military officer with a secret past he’s desperate to bury. It’s a story that for all its absurdities feels like it could have been ripped from the national headlines and cut from a patch of America’s collective wounded soul.

From the moment he receives a phone call warning his life is in danger while sitting stoned on his couch watching Turner Classic Movies to his increasing frustration at not knowing the pass code when trying to reconnect over the phone with his old radical network to finally culminating with a desperate white-knuckle car chase across a winding desert highway, One Battle After Another boldly walks a tightrope between being simultaneously hilarious and terrifying in ways that few dare attempt.

With its depiction of heavily armed fascists conducting ICE-style raids through city streets, schools, and small businesses while terrorizing communities with impunity—all in service of a secret cabal of ultra-wealthy white supremacist oligarchs determined to amass more wealth and power as a means to its own end—One Battle After Another is a tragicomic roller coaster ride through our increasingly dystopian-seeming era in U.S. history. No major release in recent memory has so bravely attempted to reckon with the empire of evil and idiocy we have found ourselves living under for at least the last decade—one that shows no signs of receding as we sink further and further into Donald Trump’s America.

It’s hardly a surprise that One Battle After Another has provoked strong negative reactions from certain corners of the media. Some right-wing hacks and grifters like Ben Shapiro have infamously accused the film of stoking left-wing violence. The irony of course is that it actually advocates the exact opposite—that you don’t have to blow up buildings or rob federal banks to effectively oppose fascism. That it is simple acts of love and kindness—good deeds carried out every day by ordinary folk—that truly keeps the darkness at bay. That simply acting with kindness and empathy within your community can amount to a revolutionary act of resistance. Of course, fascists like Shapiro or Donald Trump or JD Vance or Elon Musk could never understand that about this film, because they don’t understand kindness and empathy to begin with. That’s why they are fascists in the first place.

But I digress. One Battle After Another resonates so strongly because it so beautifully conveys its hopeful message that the collective powers of love and community—whether shared between parents and children, teachers and students, or just neighbors and drinking buddies—are ultimately the best hope we have for resisting the forces of right-wing authoritarianism that are ever working to steamroll us into submission. And that even a washed-up, pot-smoking, Steely Dan-loving, drunk-driving, ex-radical lefty like Bob Ferguson, for all his flaws, can still make the world a slightly less shitty place simply by loving his daughter unconditionally and raising her to be a caring and decent person.

For a writer/director with such a remarkably distinct vision, Paul Thomas Anderson has created an incredibly diverse body of work throughout his 30-year career. Ever since he first emerged as one of Hollywood’s most prodigious young talents with Boogie Nights and Magnolia in the late 1990s, Anderson has always been a virtuoso filmmaker who proudly wears his various influences on his sleeve. Those sprawling San Fernando Valley epics were lovingly indebted to the films of his idols Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman and bursting with youthful exuberance. In contrast, his later 20th century-set period dramas There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread, with their stately pacing and measured tones, took influence from Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, and Max Ophuls. What’s remarkable about One Battle After Another is that it, perhaps more than any film he’s made, feels like a uniquely singular achievement for Anderson. One that he has been building towards with each new feature preceding it.

To watch Anderson’s latest spectacularly mounted blockbuster is to see him expertly combine the bravura techniques of his flashy early days with the elegance of his later period style into a genre-bending dark comedy that recalls the works of Kubrick or Altman in their mad dog heydays, yet is expressed in a cinematic language with freewheeling passion and energy that is entirely unique to PTA. With its elaborately choreographed, chaotic action set pieces, kinetic tracking shots, propulsive editing rhythms, extraordinary VistaVision compositions, Johnny Greenwood’s anxiety-inducing score, and lovingly curated soundtrack with its numerous needle drops deftly deployed with pinpoint precision, this is an audaciously gripping epic that only PTA could have made.

Beyond being a stunning technical achievement, it’s also remarkable to observe Anderson’s personal evolution as a storyteller in One Battle After Another. Perhaps the strongest thematic concern in his films is that of the strained relationships between parents and children. As a man in his 50s with grown kids of his own, it’s fascinating and deeply moving to see Anderson, who once so strongly identified with the damaged kids who felt shunned by their flawed parents in his early films, now extend that same empathy to a father and mother who feel they’ve failed their child by leaving them such a messed up country. Thankfully, unlike the burned out ex-revolutionaries at the center of One Battle After Another, Anderson’s insights and instincts as a filmmaker only seem to be growing sharper and wiser with age, and our cinematic landscape is that much richer for it.

Widely regarded as one of the best actors in the world, I’m not sure there is an award for acting that Benecio del Toro hasn’t won in his long and storied career. And yet he managed to further surprise audiences with his beautiful, hilarious, and heartfelt work in One Battle After Another, emerging as a beloved and instantly iconic fan favorite in a film overflowing with terrific performances.

One of the great running jokes of One Battle After Another is how lead actor Leonardo DiCaprio’s protagonist Bob is such a bumbling stoner who, despite his best efforts and good nature, constantly needs help from women and people of color on his journey—chief among them is Benicio del Toro’s character Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, his daughter’s Karate teacher. In many ways the moral center of One Battle After Another, del Toro portrays him as a kind and calm pacifist who also serves as a paternal figure of sorts to his sanctuary city’s undocumented immigrant community. When he’s not teaching Karate classes to the local youth, Sensei runs, in his own words, “a little Latino Harriet Tubman operation”—an underground railroad of sorts for migrants seeking safety from the oppressive police state.

del Toro effortlessly embodies the unglamorous but necessary work required to protect those most vulnerable in society. Along with being a great community activist, Sensei also just seems like a really cool hang! The kind of friend you want to crack open a six-pack of Modelos with. One who will always have your back or just help calm you down or lift your spirits when you’re freaking out or in a sad place. (“Don’t go dark on me, Bob.” “Ocean Waves!”) There’s no question del Toro delivers most of the best lines in the movie, whether it’s “No fear. Like Tom fucking Cruise” when forcing Bob out of a moving car at 40 mph or nonchalantly telling police officers he’s had “a few small beers” when pulled over for speeding. No matter the situation, Sensei is able to go with the flow and stay cool in a crisis in ways that Bob only wishes he could. It’s this same fierce grace under pressure that Bob’s daughter Willa is able to channel when she emerges as the film’s unlikely heroine in its final heart-wrenching act. All in all, Benicio Del Toro gives an absolutely goated performance in One Battle After Another.