One Wild Ride: Review of One Battle After Another
★★★★
By Geoff Carter
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
In the cataclysmic first scenes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, a group of highly organized militant revolutionaries named French 75 frees a group of Mexican immigrants from a detention center. While the is not explicitly stated, it soon becomes apparent that this act of protest—so relevant today—happened sixteen years prior to the main action of the film. So, despite the best efforts of French 75, nothing has changed over those sixteen years. Immigrants are still being arrested and detained in the present, as they were then (and as they are in our own reality). It seems impossible for these revolutionaries to free themselves from this downward spiral of history—or from their own pasts.
Revolutionary zealot Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) are key members of the French 75 resistance group. During the initial assault on the detention center, Perifidia, who is an African American, confronts Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) the commander of the facility and a white supremacist, and sexually humiliates him.
After successfully liberating the Ostay Mesa Detention Center, Pat and Perifidia (the instigator) begin a torrid affair. French 75 continues to fight the power until Perfidia is caught planting a bomb by Lockjaw, who blackmails her into having sex with him. She becomes pregnant and after her daughter is born, she leaves the baby with Pat to follow her own path as a revolutionary.
After being charged with murdering a bank guard, Perfidia flips on her comrades in French 75, causing their summary executions, and goes into witness protection under Lockjaw’s supervision but, bridling under his attentions, she soon escapes.
Sixteen years later, Pat (under the alias Bob Ferguson) is living with his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. He has become an inveterate stoner with no visible means of support whose (justifiably) paranoid tendencies frustrate his daughter. When Lockjaw, whose zealous anti-immigration policies have made him popular with the far right, is invited to join The Christmas Adventurers Club, an elite white supremacist group, he enthusiastically accepts. Realizing his past relationship with an African American woman may compromise his eligibility to join the group, Lockjaw hires bounty hunter Avanti (Eric Schweig) to track down Willa Ferguson, who Lockjaw suspects may be his daughter, to kill her.
What follows is a fast-paced film that incredibly—and seamlessly—ping pongs back and forth between a high-octane thriller and an absurdist screwball comedy without dropping a beat. The cast of characters, while stretching beyond their archetypal boundaries, seem as if they might have stumbled into the spotlight straight from a French farce.
Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) is sort of an everyman. He is a paranoid stoner who lives in Baktan Cross with his daughter Willa. When Lockjaw’s shitstorm comes down and French 75 calls out a warning, Bob proves no longer a functional revolutionary. He forgets passwords, throws hissy fits, and is a paragon of the hysterically panicky dad, adding an unexpected dose of comedy to the mix, yet somehow manages to save his daughter.
Willa, on the other hand, is more of her mother’s daughter. Calm, cool, and collected, even after unexpectedly becoming Lockjaw’s target, she shows a toughness and resilience far beyond her years—and her experience. Instead of just being a prototypical damsel in distress figure, she determines her own fate.
As Steven J. Lockjaw, Sean Penn is simply brilliant. His over-the-top portrayal of the zealous and absolutist cruelty of a crusader is as ridiculous as it is frightening. He tiptoes a fine line, personifying a heartless villain while at the same time parodying that very trope. Lockjaw becomes a joke—a deadly one, to be sure—but a joke nonetheless.
Benicio del Toro’s portrayal of the sanguine Sergio St. Carlos, Willa’s unflappable Karatedo teacher and leader of the local community of undocumented immigrants in the city, is derived from the wise man stereotype. He is the perfect foil for Bob’s hysterical tantrums, and as a guy who’s cooler than Steve McQueen, del Toro brings an effortless panache to the screen. In the face of Lockjaw’s attack, he moves quickly, efficiently, and effortlessly, whether he’s giving evacuation instructions or dispatching his skateboard calvary.
The farcical situations contrast sharply with the violent scenes on which they are frequently transposed. When Bob forgets the revolutionary countersign while on the French 75 hotline, his enraged ranting—he sort of reminded me of Daffy Duck during one of his tirades—is contrasted against a fiery protest going on just outside. All the while, St. Carlos pads around the living room drinking a beer while waiting for Bob to finish so they can escape.
When Lockjaw finds Willa and subjects her to a DNA test, his frustration and fear manifests themselves in a series of tics and twitches that subvert his macho façade. He somehow looks fragile and menacing in the same breath. In Penn’s hands, this performance is simply brilliantly calibrated between the absurd and the horrifying.
The Christmas Adventurers Club (a truly Dickensian name—as is Lockjaw) is so absurdly ridiculous, the viewer is forced consider how a group of such casually evil and powerful men can be so completely idiotic, and how these sorts of hate groups exist today. Their arrogance is cringeworthy. This is the beauty of One Battle After Another. The film is an accurate reflection of the absurdity—as well as the threat—of our current political situation.
Lockjaw’s brutality and ruthlessness has become an all-too-common reality outside the movie theater. The scenes where he orders the attack on the Baktan Cross in order to find and eliminate Willia are as violent as any present-day ICE attack while St. Carlos’s efforts to evacuate his people is no less heroic than those Chicagoans who stood up to ICE.
The revolutionary fire of Perfidia Beverly Hills and Bob and the rest of French 75 have petered out as they aged, just as it did in the sixties. It is the next generation, Willa’s people, who have to take up the fight for justice. While protestors have arisen today—and will tomorrow—as they do in this film. We don’t seem to be smart or courageous enough to prevent history from repeating—as this film relentlessly points out.
One Battle After Another is also a film about a father-daughter relationship. Bob is driven to fight not out of anger or for revolutionary ideals—as he did when younger—but to get his daughter back. When Willa is spirited away by former French 75 member Deandra (Regina Hall), she tells the girl the truth about her mother and the man who raised her. While Bob and Willa share very little screen time together, their relationship establishes the core of the narrative. Bob fights for his daughter’s life in spite of the tumult swirling around them.
Paul Thomas Anderson has created a vastly entertaining movie which is also a sharp-edged satire, an edge-of-your-seat thriller, and an insightful social commentary. While current events have made the content of this movie even more relevant, Anderson’s thematic threads touch the universal, averring that the eternal values of family, courage, and love will rise above the absurdist pain, cruelty, and hate that surround us all.
This is a must-see movie, arguably the best of the year, and one which resonates throughout today’s frightening political realities.