“You know what freedom is?” a karate instructor named Sergio (Benicio del Toro) asks the man (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is sitting on the passenger door of his moving convertible. “No fear! Just like Tom fucking Cruise!” He then banks a sharp turn and his passenger goes flying off the car and rolling down an embankment. Yeah, Tom Cruise would have held on.
But then, One Battle After Another isn’t a Cruise sort of thriller. The main character is a bumbler who doesn’t know what he’s doing as his life becomes an action film. The resulting air of breakneck humor helps to make this one of Anderson’s more purely enjoyable movies. Maybe it’s not as tidy as I’d like, but then, I could say the same for all his films. The best of them are great regardless.
The story begins with an outlaw group calling themselves The French 75 hitting an ICE detention camp near the Mexican border, overpowering the guards and freeing the detained migrants. Ghetto Pat a.k.a. Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are members who have a baby together, but the group disbands after Perfidia shoots and kills a security guard during a bank robbery while Bob is at home taking care of the infant. Most of the other members of The French 75 are then killed by Perfidia’s other boyfriend Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an immigrant-hunting supersoldier with a thing for Black women — a massive thing, judging by the size of his erection when he first meets her. She brings him to orgasm by shoving his gun up his ass. Talk about unprotected sex.
This film is very loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which views the protest movements of the 1960s from the standpoint of 1990. Updating the story to the present day brings out the puckish, antic side of Anderson rather than the sober, serious-minded filmmaker from There Will Be Blood and The Master. Trying to reactivate his underground network after 16 years away, Bob can’t remember the codewords: “I’ve spent the last 30 years frying my brain with drugs and alcohol! I love them!” As he and his now-grown teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) run up and down California to escape the law, they encounter all sorts of Pynchonesque side characters, including a convent full of marijuana-growing Catholic nuns and Sergio, who has a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” at his home and keeps his cool even when armed ICE soldiers in tactical gear are coming up his front steps.
Now a star, Lockjaw is offered membership in the Christmas Adventurers Club, a cabal of rich old white guys who want to racially purify America. However, he can’t gain admission if he’s had sex with a woman of color, and Willa may be living, breathing evidence of that. He sends his soldiers after Bob and Willa, which gives rise to more action sequences than your usual Anderson film. The best is an inventive car chase through the California desert with the cars appearing and disappearing from view because of the hilly terrain. Then, too, Bob tries to rescue Willa by starting a shootout with the ICE agents, even though he’s too drunk to aim properly. An extended section with Bob trying to contact the remnants of The French 75 while weaving in and out of a street uprising against ICE is nerve-frying stuff, especially with Jonny Greenwood’s score hissing and popping in the background.
Maybe the Christmas Adventurers are too cartoonish to make effective villains, but Lockjaw shows how easy it is to abuse governmental powers, and Penn makes a great, twisted bad guy, with his military bearing barely concealing palpable hatred for a girl who may be his own daughter. He’s matched by a bristling and discontented Infiniti (the awesomely named newcomer comes from the world of hip-hop dance) and by DiCaprio as a buffoon who desperately wants to be a good dad and knows he’s not doing so good.
Well, his mixed-race daughter comes to appreciate how he’s prepared her to cope with a government that is hostile to her very existence, whether it’s with karate, firearms, or what to do during that car chase. The title One Battle After Another refers to the ceaseless threats that Ferguson père and fille face, but they’re willing to fight them one at a time and appreciate the moments of peace in between. That’s enough to make us take up Bob’s cry: “¡Viva la revolución!”
One Battle After Another
Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, and Sean Penn. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Rated R.
