One Battle After Another

The Hangover of History

Most revolutions don’t get a clean final showdown. They sputter out in smoke, paperwork, and somebody too tired to keep pretending. That sour joke runs straight through Paul Thomas Anderson’s *One Battle After Another*. I walked in expecting a tense thriller about the U.S.-Mexico border, and what I got instead was something sadder and stranger: a screwball lament for American idealism after the hangover sets in. The bleakness is obvious. The humor sneaks up on you and keeps biting.



Anderson has been poking at this material for years. The movie has long been rumored as an adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s *Vineland*, and that feels basically right. He takes the novel’s paranoia and political wreckage and rebuilds them into something faster, meaner, and more direct. Pynchon can be exhausting on the page, all manic trivia and spiraling suspicion. Anderson keeps the paranoia but finds the ache underneath it. He already wrestled one Pynchon book into *Inherent Vice*; here the pulse feels sharper, almost desperate. Shot in lush 35mm VistaVision, the film looks rich enough to touch.

Leonardo DiCaprio leans hard against his own movie-star machinery as Bob Ferguson, a washed-up former radical hiding off the grid. He slouches through the film in a ratty toweling robe, dragging his feet like a man hoping the floorboards might spare him the trouble of continuing. After so many turns as polished predators and master operators, that surrender is almost shocking. Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety that Anderson "humanizes DiCaprio and coaxes a great performance out of him" by using comedy to crack open his persona, and that feels exactly right. Bob is half fossil, half open wound, kept moving largely by inertia.



One scene early on sticks. Bob sits stoned in the blue wash of a CRT, staring at Gillo Pontecorvo’s *The Battle of Algiers* like it might hand him a map back to the revolution he misplaced years ago. Anderson lets the stillness drag until it turns oppressive, then editor Andy Jurgensen jolts the movie forward with a smash cut from Bob’s infant child to his now 16-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). That cut gets at the whole film: time does not heal, it just skips. Infiniti is terrific, all spikes and survival instinct, playing a girl who never volunteered to inherit any of this.

Then Sean Penn enters and turns the room toxic. Captain Steven J. Lockjaw is an ultra-militant military hardliner embedded in a white supremacist militia and still obsessed with hunting Bob sixteen years later. Penn plants himself in the role like a human tank, growling through the dialogue and walking a narrow line between genuine threat and cartoon grotesque. Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com called it "his best work in years", and I get why. Lockjaw is less a person than a portable piece of state violence. (And yes, the militia is called the Brotherhood of Christmas Adventurers. Only PTA could make something that stupid sound menacing.)



The movie does wobble. It can whip from farce to border-town shootout so fast your neck barely keeps up, and the script occasionally explains political decay that Anderson’s camera has already nailed. But the core holds: a father trying, too late, to keep his daughter from paying for the righteousness that once made him feel alive. Plenty of films mythologize the fight against the system. Far fewer sit with the morning after, when the system wins and breakfast still needs making. By the end, the title doesn’t sound grand. It sounds tired. That is the point.