Leonardo DiCaprio plays the oft-useless Pat/Bob, a burnout in more ways than one.The Associated Press
One Battle After Another
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
Written by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on the novel Vineland by Thomas Pyncon
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn
Classification 14A; 162 minutes
Opens in theatres Sept. 26
Critic’s Pick
Midway through One Battle After Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilarating, hilarious and galvanizing new epic, a gone-to-pot revolutionary named Bob Ferguson (a.k.a. Ghetto Pat, a.k.a. the munitions expert of a once-feared militia called the French 75), places a desperate phone call to one of his old comrades, seeking a rendezvous point where he can reunite with his on-the-run daughter.
“What time is it?” asks the voice on the other end of the line, wary of giving out secret coordinates to the wrong or perhaps compromised individual. “I don’t remember that part! Let’s not nitpick over the passwords,” Bob replies, equal parts stoned and frantic. “Maybe,” the disembodied voice replies flatly, “you should have studied the rebellion text a little harder.”
The line, a riff about somehow playing by the rules of insurgency, is the perfect sour punchline to a series of juicy, grand jokes: gags about the persistence of paranoia, the sting of oppression, the pains of bureaucracy and the Sisyphean struggles of fighting the good fight, which Anderson laces throughout One Battle After Another, a magnificent achievement that is, without hyperbole, the finest film of the year.
Thoughtful yet incendiary, romantic yet skeptical, patently absurd yet at the same time brandishing a mirror that so clearly and unforgivingly reflects our own cracked reality, Anderson’s film arrives with the kind of casual, confident brilliance that feels deceptively effortless.
The film’s many thematic, narrative and visual gambits pay off so richly exactly because Anderson never tries to poke you in the ribs, to nudge your affections this way or that. P.T.A. – whose cinephile-circle initials have become as much a brand unto themselves as any other working filmmaker today – simply locks you in from the first minute. Before you’ve had time to catch your breath and attempt to pull apart just how you quickly you were zipped along from points A to B, the ride is over and you’re demanding another go-round.
One Battle After Another marks the first time director Paul Thomas Anderson has told a contemporary story since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love.Warner Bros.
While this marks the first time that the period-piece-loving Anderson has told a contemporary story since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love (itself a film that seemed to exist outside of concepts of time and space), One Battle After Another is also split into two halves and two generations. The first takes place 15 years before our current era, following the exploits of the California-based French 75 group as they free migrants from ICE-like detention facilities and rob banks to finance their revolutionary goals.
The leader nominally appears to be Laredo (The Wire’s Wood Harris), but Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) is the group’s firecracker poster girl, a take-no-prisoners freedom fighter who captures the eyes and heart of Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). Eventually, the pair settle down and have a daughter named Willa – the sight of Perfidia, firing off a machine gun whose butt rests atop her nine-months pregnant belly, is just one of several dozen instantly iconic one-perfect-shot compositions Anderson sears onto the screen – but soon the pressures of parenthood and the pull of her guerilla instincts push Perfidia back into a life of rebellion and risk. At the same time, Perfidia develops a backwards love-hate affair with the maniacal Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a proto-MAGA type who makes it his mission in life to hunt down the French 75.
Flash-forward 15 years – all the aforementioned developments are laid out by Anderson in a relentlessly swift series of rat-a-tat-tat sequences that belie the film’s super-sized run time – and Pat, or “Bob” as he’s now known, is living a quiet, booze- and weed-addled life in the fictional “sanctuary city” of Baktan Cross alongside a teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti). While Perfidia remains in the wind, Lockjaw has finally picked up Bob and Willa’s scent, and is now determined to crush the pair in order to secure standing in a secretive sect of white nationalists who essentially control the country from an underground lair.
Very loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which filtered ideas of lapsed rebellion and unchecked greed through the vortex of Ronald Reagan’s America, Anderson’s narrative is both his most twist-filled work (secret societies, secret passwords, secret parentage) and relatively straightforward. At its core, this is a film about a father separated from his daughter by a villain whose evil knows no bounds. And yet the way in which Anderson unfolds every chapter feels momentous, the story and style working in concert to create something deeply funny, tense, rollicking, unrelenting. This is powerful, powder-keg cinema that threatens to burn the screen down every few minutes.
Everyone involved is doing their own part to keep the flames burning. DiCaprio is typically excellent as the oft-useless Pat/Bob, a burnout in more ways than one whose well-intentioned befuddlement recalls Joaquin Phoenix’s performance in Anderson’s last great stoner comedy, Inherent Vice (another Pynchon adaptation). Infiniti, in her feature-film debut, is a remarkable bundle of determination and ferocity as Willa, especially when the character faces the past actions of her absent mother. And Benicio del Toro, popping up midway as a karate-trained confidant of Bob’s who runs an underground railroad in Baktan Cross, is sublime in his restraint. His deadpan hero also might be the first character who could reasonably appear in films by both of cinema’s reigning Andersons (that’d be Wes and Paul Thomas).
Yet it is Taylor and Penn who lord over everyone, the former offering a seismic preview of a career that is just beginning, the latter utilizing a career full worthy of sometimes hammy, sometimes affecting work to deliver a magnificently perverted creation. The few moments in which Taylor and Penn cross paths, sequences that play with notions of power and pleasure to such a bug-eyed degree that you can feel the entire energy of the audience shift and squirm, represent cinematic alchemy.
Buoyed by a jittery, jangly score by Anderson’s long-time collaborator Jonny Greenwood that is electric enough to power the grids of several municipalities, the film keeps on barreling down its road, right up until the final moment – a neo-Mexican standoff, constructed with the rigour and inventiveness that wonderfully blurs the line between Anderson and, say, James Cameron – everything explodes.
By its end, One Battle After Another reveals itself as Hollywood’s most contradictory creation in ages: a crowd-pleasing political manifesto, a riotous action-comedy of ideas, a movie constructed for the eye as much as the heart and mind. Now that’s revolutionary.
P.T.A. Films, Ranked
10. Hard Eight (1996)
The first bet is always the biggest, but the payday is there thanks to members of Anderson’s soon-to-be repertory company of actors, including Philip Seymour Hoffman, John C. Reilly, Philip Baker Hall and Melora Walters.
9. Magnolia (1999)
All for the sake of momentum, but what a ride. Including the frogs.
8. Licorice Pizza (2021)
True love blooms in the director’s warmest, fuzziest offering.
7. Inherent Vice (2014)
A (slightly more) faithful dose of Pynchon, laced with enough Joaquin Phoenix laconism to get you high beyond supply.
6. Punch-Drunk Love (2002)
Anderson ruined pudding, but he saved Adam Sandler.
5. Phantom Thread (2017)
The perfectly toxic kiss, for those who love themselves sick the world over.
4. Boogie Nights (1997)
Anderson’s bid to become a big, bright shining star (to borrow the words of Mark Wahlberg’s Dirk Diggler) worked like gangbusters. And it still does today, with the director’s sophomore effort easily his most rewatchable film.
3. There Will Be Blood (2007)
“I’m finished!” Daniel Day-Lewis bellows at the very end of this dirt-under-your-fingernails saga of struggle and sacrifice, a sentiment that Anderson fortunately resisted.
2. One Battle After Another (2025)
See above.
1. The Master (2012)
Anderson – and Phoenix, and Hoffman, and Amy Adams – at their very disciplined, stare-into-the-void peak.
