One Battle After Another

 

The release of a new Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) feature film is an event for cinephiles because the decidedly quirky and celebrated auteur has a distinctive narrative style and voice in his movies. He writes and directs dense, often broadly satirical or outrageous stories about damaged people trying to recover from, move past, embrace or benefit from the damage, e.g, The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Punch-Drunk Love (2002).

That is the thrust of his latest feature, One Battle After Another, which I believe will be listed among the very best of PTA's 10 productions, maybe even moving ahead of Magnolia (1999) and There Will Be Blood (2007).

In Battle, an endlessly watchable Leonardo DiCaprio plays "Ghetto" Cat a/k/a Bob, an explosions expert who hooks up with a revolutionary mob in California called the French 75, which is waging war against the U.S. on behalf of victims of exploitation and oppression, among them immigrants in detention camps and cages.

On his first job, Cat / Bob meets at a detention center the spirited and profane Perfidia Beverly Hills (a scalding hot Teyana Taylor) and they begin a romance, of sorts, shortly after Perfidia coerces at gunpoint a dalliance with the center's commander, Steven Lockjaw (a wonderful Sean Penn), to get his "attention" and his goat. (War is hell!)

Some months pass, Perfidia and Bob are a revolutionary power couple in the Southwest underground, and she gives birth to a daughter, whom she resents. Bob takes over childrearing, and Perfidia presses on with the mission of changing the world. Soon, after a botched bank robbery, the French 75's luck runs out, and they are disbursed. Peridia is captured by Lockjaw, who promises relocation if she give up the names and locations of the others. She does and enters witness protection.

After the 75 is dismantled, Lockjaw is recruited by an underground supremacist group that calls itself the Christmas Adventurers (they greet each other by invoking the name of St. Nick and their secret knock is opening two bars to the chorus for Jingle Bells). They recruit him as an agent of racial purification.

Bob and daughter Charlene / Willa (Chase Infiniti) are in hiding, off-the-grid. Bob does little but smoke weed and lay low. When Lockjaw receives word Bob is still kicking, he dispatches his troops and thus begins the series of "battles" between supremacist eradication, governmental cold efficiency and revolutionary soulfulness.

But this is only one variety of battle depicted in PTA's landscape, which was inspired by Thomas Pynchon's Vineland. The political and the familial are also fighting for which is more important, with the clearest answer being, unironically, both and neither.