One Damned Thing After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson cosplays with real guns

I consider myself a fairly passionate Paul Thomas Anderson fan. I’m aware that he’s not for all markets; while I have legions of fellow fans, many people find his films somewhat baffling, even boring, in large part, I suspect, because Anderson has never been that interested in providing the narrative satisfactions that most people expect from movies. He is far more interested in exploring characters, relationships and themes than he is in telling a clear and compelling story. That’s generally fine with me, though, as those characters, relationships and themes are often ones that I find particularly fascinating, and that I haven’t seen explored elsewhere, at least not with Anderson’s extraordinary level of directorial mastery. My personal favorite Anderson films—The Master and Phantom Thread—exemplify what I think is most special about him more than his most widely-acclaimed films—Boogie Nights, Magnolia and There Will Be Blood—all of which, I want to stress, I also appreciated greatly.

As you could probably guess from that lead-in, I wasn’t crazy about Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, which looks likely to join that latter trio at the top end of critical and popular estimation and, potentially, win him his first Academy Award. I’m trying to figure out why the film didn’t work for me, and why it seems to have worked so much better for so many other people, and not just passionate fans.

One Battle After Another is being described both as Anderson’s first action film and his most outright funny comedy. It also appears to be his first overtly political film; the first sequence depicts the “liberation” of a detention camp full of unauthorized migrants. What genre it actually is, and whether it actually has any real politics, were questions that bugged at me all through the film.

Before delving into those questions, I should probably describe the film as best I can. The first half hour follows “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) who are members of a 1970s-style terrorist group called French 75 (a cocktail involving gin, lemon juice, simple syrup and sparkling wine). Led by Perfidia, the group engages in various actions—the successful liberation of the detention camp, a botched bank robbery—but even as she is leading French 75, Perfidia is engaged in a secret relationship with Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a petty martinet who commanded the detention camp that she liberated in the initial sequence. In rapid succession, Perfidia gets pregnant, gives birth, and then fails to connect with the child or the very idea of motherhood, instead continuing to go on missions where she promptly gets captured, rats out her comrades, goes into witness protection, and then flees her new boring suburban life into Mexico and thence to who knows where (characters later in the film speculate that she might be in Cuba or Algeria). Her baby daddy, Pat, also has to go on the lam; he changes his identity to Bob Ferguson, and takes their daughter with him into a new life far from his former radicalism.

The foregoing is speed-run so fast that it sometimes feels like a trailer for another movie, or, alternatively, like an overly drawn-out version of the opening montage from Up. Then we jump forward sixteen years. Very little has changed; Lockjaw is still rounding up unauthorized migrants and randomly terrorizing people, for a start. Bob is now a stoner living in a sanctuary city called Baktan Cross, spending most of his time on the couch in a bathrobe very clearly intended to recall Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski. His daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), studies martial arts with Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), and seems a pretty normal high school girl, not least in her comprehensive exasperation with her old loser dad. But when Lockjaw is invited to join a secret cabal of White supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers Club, he sets out to find Willa and Bob. Why? Because Willa might, in fact, be his child rather than Bob’s, and if she is then the Christmas Adventurers would surely rescind their lucrative offer of membership. Willa is whisked away from a school dance just as Lockjaw’s men are closing in; Bob flees his home and, with the help of the Sensei, gets out of town and sets off to find his daughter; and the Christmas Adventurers find out about Willa and send one of their own to eliminate Lockjaw. After a series of chases and captures and twists and turns and deaths, father and daughter are reunited, and in the final beat of the film the torch of revolution seems to have been passed to a new generation.

That plot summary makes the film sound pretty coherent and straightforward—and very plausibly like an action film. But is it one? There are certainly a number of action sequences, but many of these are executed in ways that undermine our expectations of such scenes. For example, the break-in to the detention camp at the beginning is accomplished without any notable planning or finesses—the terrorists basically walk in and take the soldiers (or ICE officers, or whatever they are) running the camp hostage, and easily hustle the migrants out without any trouble. Pat, the purported explosives expert in the group, is supposed to create some kind of spectacle, perhaps as a diversion, but there’s no real plan that requires a diversion, and what he actually does is set off a bunch of fireworks. The tensest part of the whole operation is when Perfidia strolls into Lockjaw’s office and, before she zip-ties his hands, demands that he masturbate himself to erection, thereby initiating the sadomasochistic relationship (in which the question of consent is always ambiguous at best) that will reverberate through the movie as a whole. But the tension in that moment isn’t action-movie tension; we’re not wondering whether Lockjaw will use this weird opportunity to escape, or to buy time for the cavalry to come and rescue him and his men. The tension is from the moment itself, a moment of very Andersonesque sexual weirdness.

Or consider the climactic car chase between the Christmas Adventurers hitman and Willa. This was one of the most visually-compelling moments in the entire film, as one car follows the other up and down a series of hills along the “Texas Dip” stretch of desert highway. It’s nauseating to watch, but also hypnotic—and I loved it for that combination. But it’s also really obvious that the cars are moving quite slowly, and the whole effect is more trippy and dreamlike than traditionally tension-filled. It was a fascinating choice, and one of my favorite moments in the film—but it’s notable precisely because it is not delivering on the expectations of an action sequence.

More commonly, the action scenes are subverted by being played for comedy—and often very funny comedy—so perhaps that’s the right genre. At one point, Bob, who is too old (and too stoned) for this kind of thing, is trying to follow a bunch of young skateboarders affiliated with Sensei (who is also involved in protecting unauthorized migrants) as they parkour across the roofs of town, but he fails to make a jump, falls off the roof, lands safely thanks to a tree breaking his fall, only to be tased by some of Lockjaw’s agents. At another point, Sensei St. Carlos escapes down a hatch in the floor, raising his fist in defiance before he disappears, only for a tiny rug to roll comically into place to cover his tracks. I laughed out loud both times. In general, DiCaprio’s scenes are played for comedy of various kinds—stoner comedy, hapless dad comedy, satire-of-revolutionaries comedy—and he does a marvelous job with all of it.

But Perfidia’s scenes are not played for comedy. Neither are Willa’s. And while Lockjaw is an intentionally absurd figure, and the Christmas Adventurers are clearly Pynchonesque satire (One Battle After Another was inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel, Vineland), the repressive apparatus is more generally played quite menacingly straight. In consequence, watching the film I regularly experienced a kind of tonal whiplash, sometimes within a single scene—for example, in the scene where Lockjaw has captured Willa and runs a handy instant genetic test on her to determine her paternity, a scene in which Willa knows her life is at stake, the tension is suddenly broken by her asking Lockjaw why his shirt is so tight, which leads Lockjaw to protest—too much—that he isn’t gay if that’s what she’s getting at. Which, to be fair, was funny! But it was funny in a way that broke the tension rather than helping to ratchet it up (as, by contrast, it would have done in a Quentin Tarantino film).

That kind of whiplash may be precisely what Anderson is going for, and through it may be trying to say something about the combination of utter ridiculousness and deadly seriousness that characterizes our Trumpified era. The whole film has a feeling of cosplayers with real guns—which is an accurate reflection both of the reality of left-wing terrorist groups, often more concerned with theatrical effect than with any practical objective, as well as of the reality of their groyper counterparts that are now running chunks of the government. The silliness of the names is a giveaway that we’re all playacting. But the film engenders that feeling by subtler means as well. I wondered, for example, why it was so unclear when the film was set, why costume choices, car models and technological capabilities ranged apparently randomly across eras with gleeful anachronism. That kind of jumble is true to our age of continuous remixing, where nothing new is ever created and all we can do is rummage through a giant cultural thrift store to combine nostalgias in novel ways. But it also contributed to that pervasive feeling of unreality—which, again, may have been precisely what Anderson was going for.

In any event, while the film certainly engaged me enough to be curious to untangle it, I wasn’t emotionally gripped in the way I want to be by Anderson, and I think I’ve figured out why. Anderson, as I said, doesn’t really care that much about narrative satisfaction. If he did, he would have seen that he should cut the entirety of his first half hour, even though it would mean losing a bunch of set pieces that he surely loved; Perfidia would have been a much more powerful figure in Willa’s life if we’d never seen her, and the revelation of Lockjaw’s relationship with her and possible paternity would have had a lot more power if we didn’t already know about it long before Willa did (as, for example, we don’t learn about Darth Vader’s paternity of Luke Skywalker until the end of The Empire Strikes Back). Anderson routinely makes these kinds of structural choices, even if they mean his films kind of peter out or end with an enigma, but he usually does so in the service of lingering longer in a relationship that he cares deeply about and wants to mine as deeply as possible. In this case, though, the only relationship that feels like it has those depths to mine is between Perfidia and Lockjaw. I could feel, in all their scenes, Anderson’s curiosity about their combined attraction and repulsion, their shared desire both to dominate and to submit. But we barely experience that relationship; Perfidia is out of the film after half an hour and Lockjaw remains primarily a figure of satire.

By contrast, the central relationship in the film—between Bob and Willa—never gets deeper than a familiar surface. Bob wants to protect Willa; Willa needs to differentiate from Bob and find herself. When Willa is taken, Bob tries to save her—but this isn’t a Liam Neeson film, so he’s not going to succeed at that. Instead Willa needs to save herself, which she does, along the way learning about her true origins and capabilities. There’s nothing wrong with that arc, but it’s hardly unexplored territory. And, more consequentially, the vision of a more mature relationship between father and daughter plays out in the context of this cosplaying world in a way that I found more depressing than moving. By this point, we’ve already learned that the revolutionaries are just as much silly overgrown adolescents as the forces arrayed to repress them, and that both sides are just playing a game in which you can get killed for real. But apparently coming to maturity as a woman, as Willa does, or as a father, as Bob does, just means taking up your role—or watching your daughter take up her role—in the same eternally-recurring roundelay.

Maybe that’s also what Anderson was going for; maybe it’s how he’s feeling right now. But, as the Dude himself once said, that’s, uh, that’s a bummer.