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It’s possible I’ll see this movie again in the future and understand it better. I have to assume this is possible, because I love several other Paul Thomas Anderson movies, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and Licorice Pizza. But after just one viewing, I’m sorry to say this is the ‘other’ kind of Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It’s like The Master and Punch-Drunk Love: a movie I just don’t get and did not enjoy or appreciate much at all.
I’m going to synopsize the entire film, which I don’t normally do, but I feel it’s necessary this time. If you don’t want spoilers, leave now. Ready? Take a breath. Here we go.
Leonardo DiCaprio (marginally) leads the ensemble cast as ‘Bob’, a weapons and explosives expert who’s in love with a fiery revolutionary named ‘Perfidia Beverly Hills’ (Teyana Taylor), a character who dominates the first half-hour of the film. They are part of a violent group called The French 75 who bomb internment camps, banks, and such — anything to upset the current status quo. In the course of their revolutionary/terrorist activities, Perfidia engages in an odd relationship with a U.S. military colonel named ‘Steven J. Lockjaw’, a roid-raged Popeye played by Sean Penn. Perfidia and Lockjaw are mortal enemies, but they’re also lovers. Lockjaw, a white supremacist, enjoys being sexually dominated by Perfidia. He professes his love for her, but brings her bombing spree to an end nonetheless. She’s captured, but eventually escapes to Mexico, leaving a baby for DiCaprio to raise alone. Is the baby Bob’s or Lockjaw’s?
One Battle After Another then jumps sixteen years into the future with single-dad Bob raising his teenaged daughter Charlene (Chase Infiniti). They argue for a few minutes before she leaves for a school dance and Bob lies back on his couch to get high. Then, out of the blue, Lockjaw launches a new attack. He has renewed interest in Charlene because he’s trying to join an elite, white supremacist organization called The Christmas Adventurers Club. And if they find out he has a mixed-race daughter, he’ll embarrass them. An old fellow revolutionary named Deandra (Regina Hall) narrowly rescues Charlene from military apprehension at the dance and Bob is pushed into underground tunnels beneath his house when Lockjaw storms his cabin in the woods. The rest of the film, the bulk of the runtime, then becomes about father and daughter reuniting.
Bob, a bumbling neurotic, relies on the calm, cool collectedness of one Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, played by Benicio Del Toro (by far my favorite character in the movie). Sensei runs a karate dojo where Charlene takes lessons and also happens to be the leader of a Hispanic underground railroad, hiding and transporting illegal immigrants to and fro. He helps get Bob on the path to reclaiming his daughter, who Deandra drops off for safe keeping with a group of nuns called The Sisters of the Brave Beaver. (Stay with me. This synopsis is nearly over.) Lockjaw gets to Charlene first, runs a paternity test, and discovers that he is in fact her father — not Bob. But instead of rejoicing, he now needs to kill Charlene. He hands her over to a bounty hunter for the dirty work.
In the climax of the film, Bob, Lockjaw, Charlene, the bounty hunter, and a hitman for the Christmas Adventurers Club all have a series of showdowns on a hilly desert road — a sequence thrillingly executed by Anderson. The bounty hunter takes pity on Charlene and lets her go. The hitman shoots Lockjaw in the face and leaves him for dead, Charlene kills the hitman, and father and daughter are finally reunited. Lockjaw is then revealed to be alive, facially deformed, but accepted into the open arms of the Christmas Adventurers, who then promptly gas him to death in his shiny new office. I guess he was too much of a liability for them.
In the final scene of the film, Bob gives Charlene a letter from her mother. Perfidia apologizes for not being there for her family and for not winning ‘the revolution’. She hopes that Charlene might decide to fight the revolution and do better than she did. So Charlene leaves to fight the revolution, leaving Bob to get high on his couch again.
This film simply never invited me in. I couldn’t relate or identify with any of the main characters. Bob grated on my nerves, Perfidia is a scary-ass nihilist, Lockjaw is deeply unsettling, and we barely get to know Charlene at all. I gather this is supposed to be a father/daughter story, yet these characters share little screen time together and I didn’t care about either of them enough to warrant watching them for nearly three hours. There’s recognizable humanity in Regina Hall’s and Benicio Del Toro’s characters, but they’re minor players in this sprawling tale.
One Battle After Another is a very unpleasant viewing experience when you don’t like the characters and don’t understand or appreciate what they’re doing. The only content in the film that intrigues me is the sexual power play, unsavory as it is, between Lockjaw and Perfidia, and how both of these characters seem to acknowledge that neither wants an end to their ongoing battles because they both literally get off on it. I think this says a lot about our current political divisiveness and what drives it: too many people define themselves by their hatred these days. If we ever start to get along, a lot of us are going to lose our entire sense of identity. Unfortunately, the film isn’t enough about this.
One Battle After Another might have worked for me if it were more overtly comedic and satirical — more along the lines of Dr. Strangelove or Heathers perhaps. I know the synopsis above sounds hilarious, especially given the characters’ ridiculous names, but the film takes itself far too seriously. I laughed once — after Lockjaw claims Perfidia ‘reverse raped’ him, claiming she ‘stole his power’. A member of the Christmas club then suggests she was ‘a semen demon’. Now that’s some funny shit.
Anderson seems to be crafting an allegory, and I feel like he’s trying to say a lot — too much, maybe. But it’s not a clean, direct allegory. He criticizes elements of ‘The Right’ (chiefly its harboring of white supremacists), but he also criticizes elements of ‘The Left’. When Bob needs the coordinates of his daughter’s rendezvous point, the French 75 representative on the phone won’t give it to him because Bob has forgotten one of myriad passwords. When Bob gets angry, the rep claims an ‘invasion of his safe space’. The scene illuminates the Left’s tendency to get caught up in semantics and appearances, rather than consequential action. To some extent, I think the movie is a Rorschach test — people will see what they want to see in One Battle After Another. If they want to see anything at all.
Why invite these timely political comparisons at all? Why didn’t this film take place during the ’60s or ’70s like most of Anderson’s other films? Setting it in modern-day U.S.A. conflates the film in my mind with all of today’s political strife and divisiveness. It’s as far from escapist entertainment as a movie can possibly get. Not every movie needs to be escapist fare, but today? For me? I have a hard time stomaching movies that take place in the very ugly here and now. I absolutely need some level of escapism in my movies today, and One Battle After Another offers not one ounce of it.
With Alana Haim, Tony Goldwyn, John Hoogenakker, and Eric Schweig,