Review: ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

A couple in the centre of a revolutionary cell Pat and Perfidia join in lots of fun activities like mass releases of border crossers and city wide power failures when Perfidia come across oaken martinet Captain Lockjaw. Perfidia stages a bizarre captor/captive scene with the soldier. He digs it, though or because he's renedered a sub, and pursues an encore. Over time she gets pregnant and has a daughter, ostensibly to Pat. When the gang gets busted Pat is plunged into hiding as Bob with the child. Perfidia makes a deal and flees south. Or did she? Young Willa has been told family legends that her mother died a hero. Others in the greater secret diaspora think she ratted them out. When Lockjaw gets his funny handshake opportunity to join an elite vigilante group, he has to pursue the evidence of his inter-racial failing to present cleanly and ascend to macho right Valhalla. 

Confused? You might be. This is an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Pynchon whose fairy tale named characters tote assault weapons and whose plots wind like medieval ornaments. I haven't read Vineland (nor anything but short stories by Pynchon) but what I do know is that Paul Thomas Anderson has apparently tamed Pynchon's sargasso plotting to deliver a cogent and engaging (if overlong) movie. You might not be able to keep up with all the great crowd of characters but you'll get the centrat quartet and more significant players and enjoy some well turned action and typical wry humour along the way.

The cast is not just on game but at the hands of a warmly capable actor's director and deliver. Leonardo DiCaprio is constantly funny as the punch drunk ex-agitprop operative who almost remembers what it was like three decades ago. Teyana Taylor is intimidatingly solid as a revolutionary who gets everything she wants out of what she encounters. Benicio Del Toro has a lot of fun as a martial arts instructor from the old revolutionary days who turns on a dime without a shift in his pulse. Sean Penn is given a dark, demonic other side to his ambitions to rid the galaxy of everything unAmerican, raging here and icy there. And, at the eventual centre of the quest, Chase Infiniti presents a teenager whose cool conceals a cheated mother's cosmic anger. And so on; in a Paul Thomas Anderson joint, you will end up knowing everyone.

The final act reminded me strangely of Boogie Nights, with important differences. Where Anderson's breakthrough hit used the porn mill to arrive at extended family values, One Battle After Another goes through that to pursue something more like a nature/nurture pride of craft. The culmination of the thrilling car chase along an undulating highway delivers a revelation of an intergenerational exchange. It really is a step forward for Anderson.

This is a film whose slickness masks anger. Because of the timelines of production, it would have been on its way before the Trump victory last year but it feels like a response to it. Perhaps it was more like an imagined worst case scenario. We marvel at the Rube Goldberg like falling into place of the evasive tactics of the networks and the warmth of craft of their organisers and we do begin at the border, such a centre of the worst excesses of the campaign. Anderson might well have chosen his material as a warning but found that it was more like a report.

I find it interesting that both he and the comparable Darren Aranofsky have landed on much more straightforward fare for their releases in the first year of Trump Secundus. We could also add Ari Aster's Eddington. America's social and political woes are benefitting from a surfeit of pummeling pushback from the arts. While that might come across as a big so what in light of the terrifying compliance of the nationwide cult, it can still serve as a beacon. May it glow.