Do you find yourself absorbing the day’s latest news and feel like screaming? Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson found another solution: making One Battle After Another, a film so outrageous—yet so timely—that it seems to say, “Don’t scream…just laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all.”
That he has pulled this off so expertly should come as no shock. After all, this is the man who has given us Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood. Even when I don’t care for his movies there is always something to admire about them. But he’s never gone so far out on a limb (without breaking it) up to now.
The cast, led by Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, and newcomer Chase Infiniti, is completely in sync with his audacious ideas; they enable us to buy into the film’s wild, zig-zagging tonal shifts. Pay close attention or you’re liable to miss something that comes from way out in left field.
DiCaprio belongs to a band of revolutionary activists who deal with weaponry, explosives, and narrow escapes from capture on a regular basis. Penn, in one of his all-time best roles, plays a lusty U.S. Army captain who impregnates a female prisoner from this band of extremists—and then has to deal with his own offspring sixteen years later.
The action scenes are hair-raising, with a climactic chase over a series of asphalt-lined hills on a highway. This ought to earn an Oscar for the location scout who found it. Jonny Greenwood’s percussive score helps to maintain the film’s unflagging energy and binds us to its ever-surprising narrative.
If this review seems short on synopsis, I apologize, but One Battle After Another is a difficult film to describe or synopsize. It’s easy to recommend, however, so long as you know you’re about to watch an appropriately R-rated movie where nothing is sacred. Kudos to Paul Thomas Anderson for crafting a truly great movie.
