“One Battle After Another” Is a Powerhouse of Tenderness and Fury

The film’s opening half hour is loud, tense, and extraordinarily propulsive: we follow the French 75 through raids, robberies, blown-up buildings, and smashed-up cars. Compounding the cacophony is a Jonny Greenwood score that veers between manic percolation—imagine a xylophone humping a coffeepot—and grandly operatic surges of synth. The music sweeps us up in the queasy thrill of revolt, but also in the heat and momentum of an impetuous romance. Perfidia and Pat are like an Antifa-pilled Bonnie and Clyde, minus the impotence. There is, alas, a snake in their Eden. One night, as Perfidia’s team swarms an immigrant detention center, she accosts and arouses a U.S. Army officer (Sean Penn) whose name, Steven J. Lockjaw, is as comically blunt as hers. A sexual cat-and-mouse game ensues, complete with kinky phallic gunplay. It’s a strange match, to say the least. Perfidia is the most determined of agitators, and Lockjaw is a scowling racist; in Penn’s tightly wound performance, we see lust spiked with self-loathing. But Anderson knows that, amid clashing political extremes, racial and ideological purists can make surprising, and treacherous, bedfellows. Shortly after Perfidia gives birth to a daughter, Charlene, everything goes horribly wrong: many members of the French 75 are captured or killed, and Pat and newborn Charlene go into hiding. Perfidia vanishes for good, and you miss her terribly; Taylor is so vivid that even her absence becomes a presence. Sixteen years pass. Hunkered down in the Southwestern city of Baktan Cross, Bob (as Pat is now called) learns that his fugitive past is about to catch up with him and Charlene (who now goes by Willa). He asks his old rebel comrades for help, prompting the film to spring another important question: “What time is it?” The question, delivered via pay phone, is an old security prompt, and Bob, with a memory fried by pot and booze, cannot remember the answer. (No two-factor authentication here.) He responds with an instant-classic rant, a string of escalating, expletive-laced threats. But the question reverberates for a man who’s spent years wasting away, always watching his back, never looking forward. What time is it? In more than one sense, Bob hasn’t a clue. It was shrewd, if counterintuitive, to cast DiCaprio as a man aging into oblivion. In the opening stretch, as young Pat fights the power, we’re touched by the actor’s boyishness, still clinging to him at fifty. Almost two decades later, that youthful air has gone endearingly to seed. Anderson, a big-hearted farceur, brings out the humor in Bob’s devolution without treating him like a punch line; DiCaprio, sporting a plaid robe and a dishevelled man bun, hasn’t been this shamblingly funny since “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013). He gives this bedraggled stoner a screwball nobility, plus a heart of girl-dad gold. Bob may be a fuckup, but he’s done right by Willa. A smart, plucky teen-ager with a purple belt in martial arts, Willa is played by the remarkable Chase Infiniti, and not even Anderson would have dared make that name up. The moniker, though befitting a sports car, almost perfectly describes the high-stakes pursuit that consumes the remaining two hours. Lockjaw, who has only tightened over the years, has discovered Bob and Willa’s whereabouts, and has sent in troops to apprehend them. His pretext is a crackdown on migrants—a reminder, if we needed one, that there is no easier scapegoat when it comes to the seizure and abuse of power. The film was shot, by Michael Bauman, on VistaVision, a 35-mm. format whose Hollywood glories include “The Searchers” (1956) and “Vertigo” (1958). Bauman’s images, however, have a raw, anticlassical, guerrilla-documentary immediacy: migrant families crowded into pens, a protester throwing a Molotov cocktail at riot police. The camera goes hurtling after the characters, none of whom move the same way. Note the stiffness of Lockjaw’s gait as he marches, hopeful yet anxious, through the upper corridors of Christofascist power. See Bob race to keep up with a group of shadowy young skateboarders during a rooftop escape—a resonant portrait of generational slippage. (The punch line is a tumble worthy of Wile E. Coyote.) Best of all, watch Willa’s suavely resourceful martial-arts instructor (Benicio del Toro) as he steers Bob through the bowels of his “Latino Harriet Tubman situation,” an elaborate safe house for immigrants. More stories surely lurk within these labyrinthine hallways, and there could be no wittier, more charismatic guide than del Toro, who strolls and even dances through the movie with Zen grace. Much of the film, for all its bristling kineticism, unfolds in closeup; Anderson’s favorite vistas and visions can be mapped out in the human face. Regina Hall, as a rebel who comes to Willa’s aid, makes a near-tableau of every stricken, hellbent glance. A different stillness, both sillier and chillier, suffuses the hushed gatherings of the Christmas Adventurers Club, a Christian-nationalist cabal targeting America’s “lunatics, haters, and punk trash.” If that line reminds you of Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper, from “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), railing against Communist threats to “our precious bodily fluids,” you’ve caught the film’s absurdist wavelength, though Anderson’s brand of satire has none of Kubrick’s icy perfectionism. Anderson is a rare and rangy breed of cinematic maximalist—a satirical quasi-historian and pop-cultural magpie with a gift for weaving disparate influences into a marvellously unruly synthesis. Again and again, Anderson follows the threads of his inspiration wherever they take him. Invariably, they draw inward, into a dense tangle of human relationships, where the tallest tales and truest stories lie. “There Will Be Blood” (2007), a masterpiece about oil, religion, and other desert-grown commodities, hinged on a subterranean war between father and son. “The Master” (2012), teased as a juicy swipe at Scientology, was instead a seductive, corrosive postwar bromance. With the gothic perversities of “Phantom Thread” (2017) and the shaggy, smiley hijinks of “Licorice Pizza” (2021), Anderson cemented his standing as the most wildly inventive period craftsman in Hollywood. He still is, but, this time, the period is ours. “One Battle After Another” is a father-daughter epic, with an unusually personal gush of feeling. A viewer who’s unaware that Anderson has four kids might leave the theatre suspecting as much, and wiping away tears. You can count on one hand the number of scenes that Bob and Willa share, but their connection—a swirl of protectiveness, exasperation, and fiercely unconditional love—binds the movie and its madly whirling parts together. What will audiences make of it all? A great deal, I hope. Many thrillers end with shoot-outs and chases—in this case, a mighty three-car affair, brilliantly staged over a rolling desert highway. Far fewer have the nerve to suggest that, as a beleaguered antifascist remnant stares down a white-supremacist police state, a biracial child will lead them. The times have seldom been more hostile toward political mythmaking as nervy as this, or blockbuster intelligence of this scale. Anderson’s timeliness is undeniable, but timeliness alone has never been an argument for greatness. “One Battle After Another,” as great an American movie as I’ve seen this year, doesn’t simply meet the moment; with extraordinary tenderness, fury, and imagination, it forges a moment all its own, and insists that better ones could still lie ahead. ♦