One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson's latest is a film fiercely dedicated to not taking a stance. It makes fun of everyone, which means it ultimately says nothing. It is loud and extravagant, with every bit of its over 100 million dollar budget used to trap the audience into a three-hour shaggy dog story. Ultimately, it amounts to a group of wealthy individuals leaning back and going: "Both sides, am I right?"

One Battle After Another begins with the revolutionary group The French 75 attacking an immigrant detention facility on an unmarked part of the US/Mexico border. Their chaotic party is led by Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) and her nervous but devoted boyfriend Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio). Their objectives are unclear, despite numerous loud declarations of war. "It's one battle after another," Bob declares as a mission statement right from the get go. Later, he rambles on an entire list of objectives and statements of conflicting ideologies.

Inside the camp, Perfidia assaults and sexually humiliates the unhinged Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who immediately falls in love with her. In the following weeks, Lockjaw hunts Perfidia down, leading to the collapse of her and Bob's life for the next 16 years.

It's here the movie picks up in earnest, a good half-hour into the runtime. Bob lives as a single father with his daughter, Charlene (Chase Infiniti), wasting his days on booze and drugs and increasingly useless tactics to stay off the grid. Charlene studies under the tutelage of Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), who also leads the sanctuary city where Bob and Charlene have settled.

Then, Lockjaw catches up with Bob, and things go to hell almost immediately. For the next two hours, Lockjaw chases Charlene, Bob chases Lockjaw, and everyone else scrambles for the hills as Anderson mounts increasingly absurd events after another.

In a way, this kind of a chaotic circus act could work. It is, after all, the kind of controlled madness Anderson has done so well in the past, clearly modeled after Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. But that kind of satire would require a point of view. A statement of any kind apart from a generalised shrug that paints everyone, regardless of politics or intent, with the same half-assed brush.

Consider, for example, the leads. Bob is a lost puppy with a fierce devotion to the women in his life. First to Perfidia, then to Charlene. He shouts slogans for the revolution, but it's always treated like a joke. Even when actual revolutionaries act like he's the most important person they've ever met. DiCpario's jumpy, coked-up performance plays up that uselessness. Imagine his drugged-out fight and drive home from The Wolf of Wall Street extended to three hours and you get the idea of what to expect.

For a moment, it feels like Anderson wants us to understand that Bob isn't a revolutionary. He's the archetype of someone who read a pamflet and liked the romantic images printed on t-shirts. It's only once we meet every other character in the film do we realize that this is how Anderson sees everyone desperate for a change. At one point, the revolution comes to a standstill because a character can't remember the agreed-upon password. "Maybe you should have studied your revolutionary handbook a little harder," another one mocks.

Others are equally broad and one-note in their portrayals. Perfidia is a sex pest who is quick to betray everyone in her life to keep herself free. The revolutionary group is operated by snippy millenials who complain about their safe spaces in one of the more desperately boomer gags of the film. Most of the dialog between revolutionaries is about fucking and their preference of genitalia. (One declares their name as Junglepussy while another identifies a member by their favorite flavor of vagina.) Bob mocks the only trans-coded person in the film for their looks and pronouns, and the movie paints them as the one to immediately cave into fascist demands. Every member of any resistance is either a fuckup, drug addict, or a combination of the two.

Then there's Lockjaw, a heinous portrait of ICE immorality, who the film consistently mocks with implications about being a closeted homosexual. He desperately yearns to join a secret society of racist white men called the Christmas Adventurers' Club, who meet in secret and greet one another with "Hail St. Nick!" What they actually do is left a mystery.

That kind of a gag was quaint already 30 years ago, when The Simpsons mocked The Stonecutters. Today, these people don't pretend to meet in secret, and playing them up as weak, bumbling caricatures is just lazy. But lazy is precisely the descriptor that fits most things in Anderson's vision of America. Like Eddington, One Battle After Another is the work of someone so comfortable in their bubble that it believes a generalized fart in all directions is an effective form of satire.

Singular moments spark promise of something more interesting. Del Toro's Sensei is one of them. In an extended scene (and by god, they're all extended scenes in this bloated picture), Sensei leads Bob through their sanctuary city, and we witness a community always prepared for the worst. For a second, it feels like Anderson has arrived at something. That maybe we're finally due for a conversation about the power imbalance of modern revolutionaries, where the focus is always on well-intentioned but uninformed and out of touch white people instead of those actually at risk.

That doesn't happen. Instead, it's all in service to keep Bob going. Without a hint of irony, despite a great performance from del Toro, Sensei comes and goes only as a stepping stone for DiCaprio. Throughout all this, Johnny Greenwood's incessant score sounds like someone trapped a cat inside a piano.

One Battle After Another is, according to Anderson, a "loose adaptation" of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland. Previously, Anderson did great work in adapting Pynchon's other delirious work of genre-bending fiction to the screen with Inherent Vice. There, the pointless and cyclical nature of idiots colliding with the world taking little notice worked beautifully.

Here, it feels glib and insulting. As if Anderson looked at the state of modern day America with its descent into fascism, complete with government sanctioned kidnappings and murders, and thought it was the perfect foil to present as a small, self-contained slapstick comedy.

At all times, it refuses to take a stand. It pretends both sides are equally insane and inept, even as it stages an entire citywide siege at the hands of sexually frustrated jarheads. But these aren't some tacky caricatures in reality, and presenting them as such robs the satire of any potency. Dr. Strangelove is timeless and terrifying because beneath the slapstick is the genuine threat of annihiliation. When actual ICE agents are kidnapping people off the streets, it feels impotent that the best we can muster is Sean Penn posturing in an unflatteringly tight shirt while vaguely calling him gay.

By the end, nothing has changed. Instead, Anderson paints the act of resistance as a generational thing, something we grow out of and watch our kids go through as if it was a phase. As long as there's classic American rock and a joint to go around, things will be OK.

It is slacktivist cinema at its loudest and laziest.