In “One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio Deliver an Action-Comedy Classic

The last time Paul Thomas Anderson made an overtly political film, George W. Bush was president. The US was entering the worst recession of my lifetime and fighting two wars over oil. There Will Be Blood rode nine Academy Award nominations and a legendary Daniel-Day Lewis performance to household-name status. The film only grossed $40 million domestically, $76 million worldwide, but its reputation ensures it continues to be talked about 18 years after other films of its era that grossed three or four times more have been all but forgotten.

There Will Be Blood was dour and ornate, an unapologetic studio art film in the tradition of 2001: A Space Odyssey that explored the Bush era through the allegorical lens of an early-1900s oil tycoon and preacher. Anderson’s latest, One Battle After Another, begins with left-wing agitators rescuing 200 migrants from an ICE prison. So much for allegory. It also cost upwards of $130 million, almost double the gross of his previous most successful film. It’s almost certain to lose money in the short term. I’d imagine Warner execs are hoping the film will hang around for decades like There Will Be Blood and much of the rest of Anderson’s filmography. I’m not an expert on film financing, but I know movies this good tend to hang around.

Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

One Battle After Another just keeps defying what you expect from an Anderson film. For starters, it’s pretty recognizably an action-comedy. Anderson began his career a little closer to mainstream Hollywood than he is today; there’s a long legacy of films that look and feel like Hard Eight and Boogie Nights. Even Punch Drunk Love is like an inverted negative of an Adam Sandler comedy. But from There Will Be Blood through Licorice Pizza, Anderson seemed pretty uninterested in standard genre storytelling except as a basic framework for his more idiosyncratic sensibilities.

One Battle After Another is also idiosyncratic, like the self-assured weirdo love child of The Big Lebowski, Children of Men, and Commando (I go back and forth on which is most prominent). However, it’s got the car chases and shootouts and heroes and villains that audiences expect from this sort of storytelling. It also stars one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars, Leonardo DiCaprio, in his funniest role since The Wolf of Wall Street.

Anderson says the script is an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which I should probably get around to reading sometime. That said, if you’ve even accidentally caught half a news broadcast in the last decade, you’ll have sufficient background information. DiCaprio plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, a munitions expert for a radical resistance group called the French 75, whose ranks include Deandra (Regina Hall), Mae West (Alana Haim), Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle), Laredo (Wood Harris), and Bob’s partner, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). The leader of the ICE agents is Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, doing his best to match Ben Kingsley’s inhuman performance from Sexy Beast—I can think of no higher compliment). The French 75 feels like a meta composite of several resistance movements and archetypes from American history, their actions an extended hypothetical that the film treats empathetically while still exploring the uglier consequences of their tactics.

Teyana Taylor as Perfidia and Sean Penn as Col. Lockjaw. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Eventually Pat retires to take care of his newborn daughter, Charlene, and the movie jumps 16 years into the future with a single line: “Very little has changed.” Pat has changed his name to Bob. Baby Charlene has grown into teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti). They’re hiding out under assumed identities, hoping the past won’t come knocking as pasts have a tendency to do. During the ensuing adventure, One Battle After Another wedges itself relentlessly into the craw of our modern political clusterfuck. It thumbs its nose at the racists and authoritarians while offering numerous visions of well-meaning dissidents just doing the best they can. Pat/Bob, like Anderson, is the father of a mixed-race child in a country under the hold of white supremacists. The film draws immense power from exploring that parental bond, redeploying one of America’s favorite subgenres (the avenging father action film) against the bastards who separate families.

There’s a common misconception that entertainment must be escapism. I keep hearing some version of the platitude “Nobody wants to go to the movies to see the same thing that’s happening on the news.” And look, I see the logic there. My phone unleashes a torrent of psychic damage upon me every day. It’s meant to be exhausting. It’s meant to break our spirits. You should set boundaries and protect yourself. But when I see films like The Apprentice and Eddington or TV shows like Andor, I don’t feel exhausted in the same way. Good artists are not looking to exhaust their audience. They want an emotional connection. Most, I’ve found, want to leave their audience with some kind of hope.

Chase Infiniti as Willa. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

One Battle After Another is not an overwhelmingly hopeful film, at least where America’s immediate political future is concerned, but it’s filled with examples of people taking care of each other, protecting each other from the worst consequences of an authoritarian nightmare. Much of the film is set in the fictional sanctuary city of Baktan Cross, which rises up to resist Lockjaw’s soldiers as they search for Bob and Willa. This resistance takes many forms, from subterfuge to mass protest to the simple refusal to cooperate. People also fail repeatedly, caving under interrogation, discovering the limits of their courage in a moment of crisis.

Going to the movies is not activism. It’s not an intellectually rigorous activity. We all know this. I love movies, but that’s not what they do. However, movies are great at addressing anxieties and directing our focus toward useful ideas and emotions that can be hard to locate in the chaos of life. I genuinely worry that if people keep refusing to see movies that address current events too directly, filmmakers will stop making them. We’ve seen how hard right-wing politicians fight against the speech of fairly innocuous late-night comedians. It’s far from the endgame, but the fight over what you’re allowed to say in the public square unquestionably matters. It matters that you can still make a film for more than $100 million, starring one of the world’s most famous movie stars, produced and distributed by one of the biggest and most famous Hollywood studios, that tackles these subjects directly. I worry about what happens when we surrender that ground without a fight.

Benicio del Toro as Sensei St. Carlos. Photo Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

Paul Thomas Anderson has made it so easy not to surrender. One Battle After Another is immensely entertaining in all the ways that draw people to the movies. It’s shorter than Dune: Part 2 and only ten minutes longer than Fast X! The cast is lights-out fantastic and so funny. DiCaprio, Penn, and Benicio del Toro as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos all get the chance to do some career-highlight work. Even the film’s darkest moments are tinged with humor. The “Christmas Adventurer’s Club” is just one perfect example of a spoonful of screwball comedy helping some hyperrelevant, depressing medicine go down a little easier. The aesthetics are meticulous, the visuals sophisticated and purposeful without sacrificing the kinetic intensity viewers demand from their action films. It’s sprawling and intimate, incisively subtle and baseball-bat-to-the-head obvious, far too good and interesting for anything as banal as perfection.

And it’s playing in theaters now. I strongly recommend you take advantage while you can.