One Battle After Another Review: Once More Unto the Breach

There’s an inflection point in the career of a certain caliber of artist, when even their lesser works are extraordinary but can still leave the audience wanting. Thus it was with Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 political satire, and so arguably it is with One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s freeform updating and revision of the “lesser Pynchon.”

In his latest literary adaptation, Anderson repeats what made his first book-to-screen conversion work and avoids the errors of his most recent attempt. Like There Will Be Blood, his reimagining of Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, Anderson doesn’t attempt a full conversion of the novel, homing in on a subsection. This allows him to avoid the rambling formlessness of his other Pynchon adaptation, 2014’s shaggy dog flop Inherent Vice.

However, there is still a kinship to that earlier Pynchon adaptation, in that the central figure is a paunchy former revolutionary. Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio, dewy-eyed and hilariously out of his depth) is a hippie burnout, hiding out in the woods delivering paranoid lectures about The Man to his teenage daughter (Infiniti). But these aren’t just stoned ramblings. In his youth, he was Ghetto Pat, a member of revolutionary group the French 75 whose bloody posturing finally brought down the wrath of said Man in the form of Colonel Lockjaw (Penn), a barbarian in uniform. Sixteen years later, the hunt is still on, flipping from absurdist action to callous brutality.

One Battle After Another is not a sniper rifle but a shotgun, its blast radius taking in all aspects of the authoritarianism that has crushed American progress for decades, everything from police brutality to anti-immigrant policies, agents provocateurs, racist militias, Christian nationalists, and the use of bounty hunters to disappear American citizens in what is now euphemistically referred to as extrajudicial fashion.

Anderson’s attempt to create a grand unification theory of our current political plight is far more successful than the both-sides-ism of Ari Aster’s knuckleheaded Eddington. Yet while it seems almost prophetic about what will be seen as the ICE era of America’s collapse, his attempt to modernize Pynchon never quite gels. Vineland was about the decline between Nixon and Reagan, and the novel’s not-quite protagonist, Zoyd Wheeler, represented the failure of the Yippies and the Weathermen to turn the ship of state from its full-steam-ahead course for fascism. Bob still feels of that era, but there’s a thematic disconnect between his form of counterculture and the Black Lives Matter motifs of the French 75. Penn personifies that problem as the clumsily-named Lockjaw: He does exactly what Anderson asked of him, forging an unholy mix of Mike Pence’s crypto-Christo-fascism and the teeth-sucking insanity of Michael Flynn. He’s purposefully a pastiche, and therefore never quite as chilling as the multitude of interchangeable middle-aged white guys in uniform – whether it be police, military, or tech bro body warmer – with whom Anderson populates positions of authority.

But it’s often hard to detect those subtextual imperfections because Anderson has finally found that filmmaking gear that seemingly slipped some time after There Will Be Blood. Indeed, there’s a kineticism here that he hasn’t achieved since Magnolia. This film does exactly what its title describes, never really giving the audience time to catch its breath as Bob fumbles from one catastrophe to the next. The discordant piano score by Anderson regular Jonny Greenwood binds together what is really a long series of interconnected chase scenes, directed with such verve that one almost wonders if Anderson secretly wants to remake Bullitt. Yet that political purpose ensures the action doesn’t become simply a high-speed slog. Anderson still directs with purpose, and while One Battle After Another is never as coherent as it is exciting, it avoids the tag of being “lesser Anderson.”