One Battle After Another is the Only Film That Captures What America Has Become

It's hard to say which master Paul Thomas Anderson looks to with the most admiration and from whom he draws inspiration, ultimately producing a film that is an exaltation of his own mastery: whether Thomas Pynchon, the Coen brothers of No Country for Old Men, Alfred Hitchcock, or, ultimately, himself. From Pynchon, a cult author celebrated by critics and considered one of the great American masters, Anderson takes his source material. It's not the first time he's done this, but compared to Inherent Vice, the challenge is even more demanding: Vineland (1990) is unanimously considered an unfilmable novel, due to its writing style, the complexity of its plot, and the polyphony of voices it gathers.

Anderson, who here is involved as author, director, producer, and cinematographer, despite being a great admirer of the author, overcomes the problem with a mastery that makes his writing operation seem easy. That is, to take the essence of that novel, that something Pynchon had understood about American identity as it was changing in the 80s, but only in the sense that is directly related to our present. From there, he crafts his story, Andersonian to the core and, for the first time in mainstream American cinema, truly capable of depicting the United States of Donald Trump's second term (and, by extension, much of the West). It starts with the accelerator already pressed to the floor, horny, violent, vulgar, with two fronts clashing.

The revolutionary or terrorist group (depending on one's perspective) France 75 assaults a migrant detention center, imprisoning the military personnel present and freeing the undocumented immigrants. Leading it is the unscrupulous, unstoppable African-American activist Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), romantically linked to Ghetto Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio). After the birth of their daughter and the woman's disappearance (who betrayed her comrades to save herself), the man is forced to flee and change his identity. We then follow Bob and little Willa sixteen years later, when the army, Masonic organizations, and the government are again on their trail, led by Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). On one side, the obsessive militant creed of the revolutionaries; on the other, the cocktail of machismo and racism of the institutions: in between, a Leonardo DiCaprio as a drifting father, drunk and high, but still paranoid enough to teach his daughter to watch her back.

Anderson Effectively Portrays the Two Fronts into Which the No Longer United States Are Split

One Battle After Another is, as the title suggests, a very long (over one hundred and forty minutes), agitated, relentless sequence of actions and reactions of a father and daughter who are suddenly catapulted into his political past and try to reunite. The characters embody the two fronts into which the United States is split: one obsessed with Caucasian purity, sexual orientation, a vision of the nation made up of men plotting in secret rooms and mothers making pancakes upstairs; the other paranoid with tunnels to escape under the bed, revolutionary books to memorize to exchange coded signals, paranoia about technological tracking, and institutional paternalism. They are two monoliths that define themselves both in their identity and in opposition to the other, but Anderson does not forget to place stumbles, inconsistencies, and unforeseen events on both sides of the ideological barricade. Thus, the dependence of the younger generation on cell phones or the meticulousness of a revolutionary who is a little too fixated on passwords can make a difference in one sense or another, just like Penn's macho soldier, with a waddling gait and an awful brush cut, who has an irrepressible (and reciprocated) fixation on the African-American revolutionary who theoretically embodies everything he wants to destroy but practically "brings him to attention" even genitally, with her mere presence.

The ruthless and brutal way in which one side hunts the other cannot but recall No Country for Old Men, one of the last mainstream US films to depict a certain evolution of American identity. In a cinematic moment when so many authors recount the recent or distant past due to the difficulty of saying something about this present that is distressing but never simple to explain, Anderson manages to achieve everything that Ari Aster failed to obtain with his Eddington, to cite the most recent failure in this regard.

He does this through his characters, of course, but also by weaving around them an infinite series of references to the immediate present that work incredibly well with the story he tells. Details like the children in the ICE center playing soccer inside the enclosures, the three henchmen whose dark silhouettes dart across the city rooftops while protests rage, artfully diverted to violence by police infiltrators. The film opens, not by chance, with Bob's nervous and anxious walk fading into Willa's, both on a viaduct from which a small migrant tent city can be seen. That of One Battle After Another is an America that can no longer hold multiple souls together and wishes to be a monolith. Thus, it can no longer be both the embodiment of that Caucasian, religious, and conservative image it wishes to project and, at the same time, a melting pot of cultures that keep it alive and in motion. The contrast is such that it ends up becoming a thriller, an endless chase at whose margins remain the "resolved" characters like sensei Sergio: the excellent Benicio Del Toro embodies the director of a gym that facilitates the entry of migrants into the United States, on a solidarity basis, not economic. A morally upright man but not without irony, calm, faithful, quietly sure of what needs to be done on a human and social level. He is the embodiment of a third America, supportive, different, which remains in the background of the confrontation between the two militarized and opposing visions.

One Battle After Another is the Perfect and Contemporary Counterpoint to Anderson's Other Masterpiece: There Will Be Blood

Within this endless film that portrays a nation at war with itself to truly define what it is and who represents it, there is also a family story: that of a father who failed as a parent because he let himself go, but despite the dangers and his drug-addled brain, he continues to search for his daughter. Willa is so strong-willed, so similar to the mother who left him because she was afraid of getting stuck in a bourgeois life, full of routine and certainties that deep down Bob would want and she wouldn't. Yet Willa, who gradually becomes the protagonist of the story, is only similar to herself, despite having to live with the legacy of her parents and their mistakes: she is the voice of her generation in confrontation with the paternal figures placed before her, she is the embodiment of a hope for change and solution where previous generations have failed.

Thus, One Battle After Another becomes somewhat of a counterpoint to There Will Be Blood, another Andersonian film based on a family relationship that defines the United States starting from its most domestic core. There, however, the father-son relationship was the very root of the film's tension, while here, despite Bob being anything but an ideal father, it becomes decisive precisely thanks to the bond with his daughter, to the family he built on the run and under a false identity.

Also very Andersonian is the very long finale in the middle of the desert, among the ups and downs of a sunny and isolated road where Bob and Willa continue to brush past and miss each other, chasing each other, confirming the director's bizarre obsession with unconventional driving scenes, of which he had given us a small taste also in Licorice Pizza.

What is surprising is the scale, the epic magnitude of this film, as ambitious as Anderson perhaps hadn't been since The Master. An ambition that Anderson emphasizes and pursues, for example, also in the emphatic and open-scene use of orchestral themes composed by long-time collaborator Jonny Greenwood. A magnitude that is reflected in the format chosen for the film – shot entirely in VistaVision 70mm film – and in how the story is not afraid to linger, expand, and relaunch in terms of spaces, presences, and spectacularity.