With the release of “One Battle After Another,” writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson cements himself as one of the greatest living filmmakers, and may have just released the best film of the decade.
Anderson’s career has been one full of singular and visionary films that have garnered vast acclaim. Since his 1997 breakthrough “Boogie Nights,” Anderson has continued that success with massive epics like “Magnolia” and “There Will Be Blood” alongside smaller gems such as “Punch-Drunk Love” and “Licorice Pizza.” He has made a name for himself through explorations of family, changing times and complex character psychology.
All of these themes are retained in “One Battle After Another,” but two things make it stand out among his filmography. First, it is his first film since 2002’s “Punch-Drunk Love” to be set in the present day, touching on specifically modern issues of immigration, revolution and gaps between Generations X and Z. Second, this is his largest canvas to date, with a budget between $130-175 million and some of the most elaborate setpieces of his career.
Despite the grandeur of such an enterprise, Anderson remains focused on his characters and their personal conflicts alongside the action sequences and location work. The film follows Leonardo DiCaprio as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, an ex-member of a radical revolutionary group known as the French 75, a collective infamous for invading immigration detainment facilities to free detained immigrants and blowing up buildings to make examples of their political enemies.
The group falls apart as its leader Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by singer Teyana Taylor, is captured by a commanding officer known as Sergeant Lockjaw, played by a menacing yet exaggerated Sean Penn. Perfidia is forced to rat out her fellow members, causing the group to disperse, as Pat must hide out with his and Perfidia’s newborn daughter in a sanctuary city.
After this prologue, filled with thrilling action and surprising comedic elements, the film picks up sixteen years later. Pat has taken the name Bob Ferguson, now a burnout who spends his days smoking weed on the couch, while his daughter Willa, played by Chase Infiniti, is forced to take care of him while getting through high school.
This state of not-quite harmony is ruptured once Lockjaw, attempting to gain entry into a secret white supremacist society known as the Christmas Adventurers, realizes that Willa might actually be his daughter, stemming from a secret relationship with Perfidia. Recognizing the complications that having a biracial child would impose upon his application for this position, he decides to hunt down Bob and Willa.
This provocative setup in an ostensible blockbuster just shows how bold of an artist Anderson is, but his skills go beyond the plot. The movie was shot on old film stock known as VistaVision, creating several creative sequences shot with stunning cinematography from Michael Bauman that leaves no doubt about his skills to the audience.
In particular, a large portion of the middle section is spent on a prolonged series of scenes showing Bob attempting to find the rendezvous point where the French 75 is taking his daughter. Anderson balances the comedy of Bob failing to remember the old passcodes his group uses to retain secrecy, his brain having been fried from years of excessive substance use, alongside highly intense thriller scenarios as Lockjaw gets closer to discovering him. It culminates in a stunning rooftop chase that is filmed against a purple sky while the characters are framed in silhouette.
This would be the showstopper in any other director’s movie, but Anderson saves the best for last, culminating the film in an awe-inspiring car chase scene taking place in a desert, with incredible attention to geography and cinematography that somehow makes the common sight of a road feel alien and threatening. The scene is only elevated by a percussive and pressurized score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood.
While “One Battle After Another” could have simply stopped at being a thrill ride of unbridled creativity, Anderson never loses sight of the emotional core at the center of the film. Bob is a man who is terrified that all his work has been for nothing and that the world he’s left for his daughter is one of hopelessness and increasing dystopia. While the film doesn’t exactly deny Bob’s fears as false, it also maintains an optimism that there can still be happiness in a world gone mad.
Anderson ends the film on a firm belief that the children of those who failed before can continue where their parents left off, while finding a moving reconciliation between father and daughter that takes an unconventional but deeply satisfying route. In a career filled with masterpieces and canonical classics, “One Battle After Another” might be Anderson’s boldest, most empowering and most unforgettable statement of purpose to date.
