One Battle After Another

I’m not an action movie kind of a gal. I don’t like violence on screen. I’m also not a fan of a long movie. If you can’t tell the story in under 2 hours are you sure it’s not a TV series instead? (I’m looking at you Eddington). So, when I initially saw the trailer for One Battle After Another, I wasn’t convinced it would be for me.

But then I heard there was Oscar talk surrounding the film. I’d even read one critic calling it the movie of the decade. So, how could I afford to call myself a movie buff if I didn’t give it a go? I needed some space and time to make the commitment, but off I went to watch the film.

I’m going to be honest I wasn’t convinced I’d made the right choice for quite a while. The first half hour of the film was violent, filled with sexually charged humiliation, a disconcerting sense that no one was going to be a person to root for. The pace was fast, attack after attack and while causes might be just, nobody was likeable, compassionate or worth sticking with. Was this really necessary? Motivations so base that they can only lead to more violence…

And then it changes. The back story, that first thirty minutes is a set up, that begins to matter.

If I were to draw a graph of the action, it would start big, there would be a sudden drop and then a steady crawl back up and up and up to the climax.

So, here is that back story.

French 75, a revolutionary group is initiating a operation to liberate migrants awaiting processing in an inhumane human warehouse somewhere on the US side of the Mexican border. The group is led by Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor) and she is magnificent: fearless, rage-fuelled and sexy. Alongside her is her partner, the faithful, unquestioning, technically-minded, clear-eyed “Bob” (Leonardo di Caprio). Perfidia sexually humiliates Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) which triggers a sexual obsession within him for a woman he considers beneath him (as a white supremacist), but who he wants to have control over him. Power and control are the only ways he knows how to relate to other people. And in this way, he is not that different from the target of his obsession. With Lockjaw stalking Perfidia, there is one terrorist attack after another. While the audience may empathise with the views and targets of French 75, they might not approve of their methods. They may find their aggrandising egos difficult and lack of doubt difficult to stomach. And then the action has to stop.

Cut to sixteen years later and Perfidia is on the run. Bob and their daughter, Willa, are living in hiding in the border town, “Bakton Cross”. Bob has become a stoner, frying his brain on weed and alcohol. Willa is 16 and trying to balance her love for her paranoid father’s suffocating protection and leading a normal high-school life.

But Lockjaw is out there – and he has his reasons for wanting to get to Willa.

And now the action really begins anew, to produce a politically-charged drama-comedy.

This is a film about gang warfare. Gangs come in different shapes and sizes, with varying tentacles of power and influence. Some are state sanctioned and some live outside the state.

The choice of an immigration warehouse as the starting point makes the film feel very current, especially as we discover there is a cabal of rich white men who believe in racial purity that could be taken from this moment in history. But there is no co-option of current jargon – no mention of MAGA, Antifa, or ICE. It is both of this current historical point and beyond it. Paul Thomas Anderson’s script and direction points to the ongoing battle, with historical mentions of slave-owning presidents and the Battle of Algiers playing on a TV screen. It would be possible to spend hours discussing how the film portrays the big picture of liberation and the base elements that allow whole armies to be built on one man’s sexual fetish.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s script and direction have produced an ambitious, sprawl of a story that plays with peaks and troughs of action.

The supporting cast are formidable. Sean Penn as Lockjaw embodies a stoic kind of masculinity that only believes in physical strength. He holds within the role both the cartoonish and the lost. Teyana Taylor as Perfidia strides and swaggers with ferocity, denying any softness.

But it is DiCaprio that produces something that is emotionally whole. He is the major source of the comedy, bumbling through incompetent heroism despite his fried brain. But also a deep emotional portrayal of a parental love that can be seen in his face as he glances at his daughter. He carries paranoia and compassion in equal measures.

And the movie did something I didn’t know was possible. It made me care about and grip my seat at a car chase. I have never seen anything filmed like the final chase before. It was held together by a sparse score (composed by Johnny Greenwood) and the tension of seeing and not seeing.

I get the Oscar buzz. I’m glad I made the time.

I can imagine that if this comes up on my TV screen in a few years’ time I will find myself holding my breath at the chase scene again. I would hold out to the credits to hear Gil Scott-Heron's the Revolution Will Not be Televised.

But I would also recommend that, if you can, see it on the big screen. It uses the breadth of cinema to capture the scale of landscapes. And the intimacy of the closeup to bring us into a character’s fear.

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