ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

As with any great epic, we're anchored in a human story, that of Bob and Willa, a father and daughter team coming apart at the seams as Bob's paranoia threatens to estrange Willa in her developing teen years. We don't spend a lot of time with them together, but the dynamic is clear - he's a deadbeat dad, getting drunk and stoned all day in order to calm his nerves, while she sits somewhere between dependent and babysitter, old beyond her years, not just by inherent wisdom but by circumstance. Bob has trained her for the possibility that something may go wrong one day, but it's clear from the complete terror on both their faces when the moment finally arrives that they weren't expecting it to actually happen. And instantly, the film tears them apart, so the emotional core of the film, in the midst of its narrative and political scale, is the hope that this father and daughter can find their way back to one another. Within the chaos is a palpable emotional core we can connect to.


It's a useful reminder that what we have here is an enormous human story, that the people we see detained in cages or hiding in dark rooms for safety are human beings. It gives the revolutionaries a grounding in humanity and makes the armed forced inherently inhuman. The question throughout the film becomes whether to protect your sense of humanity or reject it, and while the film isn't so didactic as to go with a black-and-white sense of right and wrong, it's the choices of whether to help or hunt that divide the characters. If that human core is anchored in Bob, Willa and those around them, the inhuman comes in the grotesque (and grotesquely funny) Colonel Lockjaw, a carcass of muscle, tissue and sinew, wound so outrageously tight that he can barely walk. His pursuit of Willa and Bob, as well as retribution against Perfidia, is also a task set for him to prove his inhumanity, Anderson throwing in a secret society of rich white supremacists into the mix.

One of the highest compliments one could give the film is how wholly it evokes the satirical texture of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War masterpiece 'Dr Strangelove', walking the fine line between the ridiculous and the horrifying. While Kubrick's film is far more of a comedy than 'One Battle After Another', they both employ the same trick of using absurdity to make you laugh in order to comprehend the film's existential dread. We know that good people do good, extraordinary things to help one another, and the sense of community and care the film depicts is deeply moving, but white racists in fancy rooms with ridiculous rituals often feel like hypothetical fantasy. Here, as in 'Dr Strangelove', the ridiculous is made frighteningly palpable. Like Kubrick's film, it convinces you that the wheels of the world are turned by rich white maniacs.

Anderson chooses to unravel his view of the United States's slide towards authoritarianism and fascism on a grand canvas, the streets of small-town USA becoming battlefields. There's even a sense of scale in the way he and cinematographer Michael Bauman ('Licorice Pizza') shoot domestic spaces, packed with cramped individuals trying to stay safe. The film moves with startling rhythmic precision, Jonny Greenwood's ever-building panic attack of a score matched by Andy Jurgensen's exquisite editing. He and Anderson know when to leave us suspended in anticipation, watching carefully as every chess piece moves into pace, terrified at the inevitability and dazzled by the dexterity. Anderson has always been an expert at spinning multiple plates at once in his films, but this often has to do with character and narrative. In this film, he's now dealing with elaborate action sequences, massive crowd scenes, long takes with a staggering amount of moving parts, and he does so with astounding confidence. Despite the chaos, there's a clarity to 'One Battle After Another'. He knows the story he wants to tell, he knows why and he knows how. This is easily his most pointed and political film, and his approach is uncompromising and furious. Even when he is lampooning the liberal characters, his alignment with them is never in question. His dagger is sharp, pointed and precise.

Despite the extraordinary cast Anderson has assembled, it's hard to really single any of them out. It's even harder to pinpoint someone as the "lead". As is his immense skill, Anderson gives each their moment in the sun, balancing them out to create an ensemble in the truest sense. DiCaprio and Penn are giving some of their best work to date, Benico Del Toro and Regina Hall also steal every scene they are in, and Teyana Taylor truly blows the doors off the film in its opening minutes, she's so dynamic. Perhaps the spotlight should go to newcomer Chase Infiniti as Willa, who is thrown into the ring with these legendary actors and matches them blow for blow. Anderson asks an enormous amount from her, both physically and emotionally, and yet her performance feels so effortless. I can't see a world where this doesn't lead her to a great career, maybe even awards attention in the coming season.

A new film from Paul Thomas Anderson always comes with astronomical expectations, but 'One Battle After Another' completely surpasses them. This is a major work of U.S. cinema, striking that incredibly rare balance between artistry, entertainment and social commentary. Every moment you think it can't get any bigger, any more ridiculous, any more intense, the score rises to a new pitch and the camera moves closer and the editing picks up pace, your heart beating faster and faster. Like 'Chinatown' or 'Nashville', this is a film about the United States as an institution, an idea and an impending catastrophe, a dark prophetic satire where the prophecy it predicts is already unfolding before our eyes. At its most overwhelming, it all begins to feel so futile, that the need for revolution and dissent will never end, that freedom will never be achieved, that the powerful will find a new way to fuck us over, that fight will follow fight will follow fight, loss will follow loss will follow loss, and the cycle will just go round and round forever. What the film asks is, will we lose hope and step off the cycle, give up and let these monsters win, or will we keep going regardless, knowing it probably won't ever end, but that we fight back, no matter what?

'One Battle After Another' isn't just, arguably, the best film of the year. It's the battle cry we so sorely need.