We’re living in a time when the news is stranger than fiction. What should filmmakers do in such times? Paul Thomas Anderson, one of our best film directors, has chosen to face this moment by combining the action film with satire. The result is his latest movie, One Battle After Another.
In a sort of alternate version of recent history, a revolutionary group called “The French 75” breaks into an immigrant detention camp, freeing all the prisoners. One of the revolutionaries, a black woman calling herself Perfidia Beverly Hills, and played by Teyana Taylor, enlists a comrade named Ghetto Pat, a bomb expert played by Leonardo DiCaprio, to set off an elaborate fireworks display during the operation. Inside the prison, she captures its commander, an abusive martinet named—I kid you not—Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn, and proceeds to humiliate him sexually. Despite the grandstanding, the group succeeds in escaping. Perfidia and Pat become lovers, while Lockjaw becomes obsessed with Perfidia, at one point letting her go after she agrees to have sex with him, but later capturing her and putting her in witness protection.
Anderson says that One Battle After Another is inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Vineland.” There are thematic similarities, particularly in the book’s wry, amusing portrait of past-their-prime radicals, but the names and the plot are completely different. The main source of inspiration for Anderson seems to be Pynchon’s habit of portraying American social and political culture with exaggerated satiric flourishes. Here the revolutionaries’ weird pseudonyms and their way-out version of 1960s left wing jargon is meant to flavor the realism with parody. Satiric excess is firmly established by Sean Penn’s mean repressed soldier Steven J. Lockjaw, the funniest performance he’s given since Jeff Spicoli. It’s funny because he plays it mostly straight, which means the absurdity is more delicious. In the end, Lockjaw’s desire to be a major player in a racist deep state would be pathetic if it weren’t so absurd.
Now we jump sixteen years ahead, with DiCaprio’s character Pat, who now calls himself Bob, hiding out in a corner of northern California, taking care of Willa, the daughter he had with Perfidia. He’s now just an aging pot head. But in the meantime Lockjaw has become a powerful colonel—he’s figured out where Bob and Willa are, and goes after them. They get separated, and Bob has to go underground again to find his daughter. A great running gag is his frustration that he can’t remember some of the elaborate passwords needed to get help from his old group. He got stoned and forgot them. He does manage to enlist the help of a karate teacher and immigrant activist named Sergio, played by Benicio del Toro. The contrast between the always cool and collected Sergio and the frantic, paranoid Bob is hilarious. DiCaprio and Del Toro make a great team.
This in fact is an exciting action film, not some silly take-off with one-liners. Instead of jokes we get adrenaline, but with a satiric slant. Straddling the line between passion and defiant mockery, One Battle After Another is the right movie for this moment.
