RATING
Director(s): Paul Thomas Anderson
Country: United States
Author: Paul Thomas Anderson, Thomas Pyncho
Actor(s): Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro
Written by Tom Augustine
Paul Thomas Anderson makes it look easy — too easy, possibly. This was the concern I had after Licorice Pizza, a film that is enormously enjoyable but almost too good, in a traditional sense, to have real, lasting impact. I have struggled to articulate what my problem was — it was, as with most Anderson films, virtually above reproach on a technical level; a glorious personal portrait of California as Anderson remembers it from his childhood, a moving, strange love story, and a fascinating B-side to Punch-Drunk Love. But, as with some of Anderson’s other films, there was so much there there that it made the lack of something else, something deeper, more acutely felt. It seems nigh-on sacreligious to deride a film for being of too high a quality, but the feeling never quite left my mind — I should be enjoying this more than I am. Had Anderson lost his touch? Or had the persistent categorisation of Anderson as a ‘great, important filmmaker’ always been a case of cart-before-the-horse? Were his films really of such magnitudinal quality that any qualms should be immediately quashed? At the same time that, in film discourse circles, fans returned over and over to Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, rumblings stirred elsewhere that Anderson may not ever have been as vital and beyond-reproach as his reputation might suggest; perhaps Boogie Nights really is just a work of Scorsese-cribbing; Inherent Vice too muddled; There Will Be Blood never quite as good as its great competitor No Country for Old Men; Magnolia too overwrought and ambitious for its own good (that one I actually agree with).
Then, as happens over and over again with Anderson, along comes his new film, which blows all preconceived notions out of the water. One Battle After Another is that magnitudinal film of promise, the one that it feels like Anderson has been building towards for at least two decades but also moves and imprints upon you like nothing else in his catalogue. It is a work that speaks to our current moment with a clarity and urgency that other, lesser filmmakers would handle like a blunt object — but it is, of course, timeless and totally laser-focussed on its rich, soft emotional core. The film was such a monumentally involving, powerful experience that, when it ended, I raced from the theatre as fast as possible, totally unable to make any comments on the film of substance to my screening buddy, nor willing to hear what anyone else thought.
It also happens to coincide with the release of Thomas Pynchon’s new book, his first in twelve years, Shadow Ticket — Anderson’s film is, after all, inspired by one of Pynchon’s most revered works, Vineland. Many have made the apt observation that the world we live in, which Pynchon once deftly satirised in ways we read as cartoonish, has started to seem molded in the man’s creative image. As Kathryn Schulz put it in her New Yorker review of the new book: ‘America, circa now… The President of the United States is busy redecorating the White House and bent on buying Greenland. A new wonder drug is making people skinny. Domestic affairs are increasingly controlled by an upstart political entity whose official status is murky but whose powers are all but limitless: DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, which was started by a multibillionaire with a sideline in unusual forms of transportation—rocket ships, Cybertrucks, Hyperloops—and named for an internet meme featuring the Comic Sans typeface and a Shiba Inu. Tens of millions of people, followers of a mysterious figure known only by the letter “Q,” believe that many of the nation’s leaders are involved in a global child-sex-trafficking ring that will one day be crushed in an all-encompassing, all-cleansing event called The Event.’ You don’t need to be a detective of the Doc Sportello kind or any other to align our current sense of societal bewilderment and madcap fascism with the work of the mysterious, largely unseen Pynchon. I know I’ve felt it — a new and sinister blend of helplessness and overcrowdedness, even more insistent and oblique than the years leading up to this point. In the timeless words of @horse_ebooks: ‘Everything happens so much’.
And yet, One Battle After Another, for all its shadowy societies and colourful supporting characters, feels astonishingly clear — the stakes are immediately established and never fall into murkiness. The plot progresses with the single-mindedness of a Terminator — fittingly, as T2: Judgment Day, one of Anderson’s favourites, is a vivid source of inspiration for One Battle’s intense sequences of pursuit beneath a burning American sun. On a microcosmic level the film is the story of a father and daughter — Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), also known as ‘Ghetto Pat’, a one-time anti-fascist freedom fighter now in hiding with his young daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) after her mother (Teyana Taylor), a badass revolutionary named Perfidia Beverley Hills, is captured by white supremacist Army Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn). When Lockjaw finally locates the pair, a series of escalating misunderstandings and near-misses sees various parties pursuing or fleeing each other across America — Lockjaw seeking to capture Willa, Bob (thinking Willa has already been captured) seeking to liberate her, Willa seeking to get away as fast as possible. At the heart of this is a deeply resonant story of chosen family, particularly between father and daughter, as deadbeat, grieving Bob strives in the only way he knows how to give his daughter a decent life. Anderson, once a coke-fuelled, hyperactive upstart, has a certain world-weariness and maturity: enough to cast his own avatar, in the form of Bob, as a bit of a hapless loser, while his own daughters have a fire and intelligence all their own.
It’s unlikely we’ll get a better film than Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest masterpiece One Battle After Another in 2025, a daring synthesis of the modern culture at large, wrapped up in effortless filmmaking verve and majestic, elegant storytelling. It feels at once old-school and thrillingly new — it may be the defining work of the decade so far.
On a macro level, the film is about, well, pretty much everything — like Sinners, another excellent blockbuster from 2025, this is a film with genre elements in service of vivid, angry purpose; like Eddington, another brash, ambitious auteurist effort from 2025, it is a film that employs a canny skewering of ‘the culture’ at large to tell stories of deeply fallible humans — the crucial, fatal element in a world spinning out of control. Anderson was handed a greater sum that he has ever had to tell this story, and he makes use of every cent — the film is genuinely epic, sprawling, ever-evolving and shifting. Its purpose is nothing short of righteous — its characters are revolutionaries who don’t always make the right decisions, but do so for the right reasons. Anderson doesn’t play around with what they’re up against, either — Lockjaw, with the might of the US army behind him, is himself in thrall to a shadowy sect called the Christmas Adventurers Club, who are considering him for a position in the society. They are a group of white supremacists standing squarely behind the levers of power. In some of the most cutting casting work of the year, none of these men appear to have distinguishing features of any kind — most are clad in khakis and Patagonia jackets, with square, handsome faces so bland they could be used to advertise a bedding section at your local K-Mart. These are the villains of One Battle After Another — not prowling, disfigured monsters, but the guys who write LinkedIn posts in between jaunts on Epstein’s jet. Anderson routinely investigates and interrogates the limits of what we will do for the greater good — in this moment in which we are all called upon to say something, do something, how do we save what we love from the abyss? Can we do that at all? Is it right to try and do it, if so?
For this mission, Anderson has assembled an absurdly stacked cast, all of whom are operating at the absolute peak of their powers. DiCaprio, firmly in character actor mode, is barely the protagonist of the picture, and frequently fades from focus. The actor appears to be comfortable with this, allowing his Bob Ferguson to merge with the tapestry of American faces that Anderson puts on display. It’s of a piece with his other mid-career efforts like Killers of the Flower Moon and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (or even, God forbid, Don’t Look Up) — his presence is enough to ensure the big bucks and (hopefully) a few tickets sold, but he’s happy to cede the floor to other performers chewing the scenery. Much of the attention will be on Sean Penn, given his Anton Chigurh moment as Lockjaw — a terrifyingly capable yet hilariously pathetic shark of a man, a killer who must constantly squash down his own grief, self-doubt and vulnerability in service of a goal that we are never sure he even truly wants. We know it’ll certainly never find him happiness — the apparent awareness of the same seems to threaten to literally burst through the actor’s skin, as though he were channeling Vincent D’Onofrio’s Men in Black insectoid. He is more than capably matched by newcomer Chase Infiniti, known until now for her work in the Apple TV series Presumed Innocent, here arriving at a new level of stardom, holding the screen against some of our most renowned performers. In smaller roles, Taylor leaves one hell of an impression, with much of the film’s early action focussed on her exploits as a freedom fighter, while Regina Hall and Benicio Del Toro, as a fellow revolutionary and a people-smuggler turned karate sensei (yes, really), provide magnetic supporting turns, performances that thrum with inner life. We often tend to reward the white, male performers, particularly ones whose transformation is into something monstrous — think Sam Rockwell in Three Billboards, or Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds. It would be a shame and an injustice to focus just on Penn — good as he is — for a role of immediate showiness when such a varied and multi-racial cast is bringing career-best efforts across the board. Taylor and Infiniti, in particular, are good enough here to warrant entire films solely about their exploits.
The biggest star of them all, though, is Anderson himself, morphing once again into a director capable of wielding sizeable budgets to means both artistically satisfying and crowd-pleasing. One Battle After Another is a film designed to be felt, not intellectualised — watching it is a tense, funny, thrilling experience, one that lucidly diagnoses the problems that face us but never lets the knowledge of those things overwhelm the necessity for just telling a really good fucking story. I can’t think of another film released this decade in which so many elements of the craft seem in total, assured synthesis — the imagery, on glorious VistaVision (as seen in last year’s The Brutalist), is tactile and lived in — it’s easily one of the best looking films of the decade. Sound, editing, music choices (including a hilarious Steely Dan needle-drop) — everything feels familiar to an Anderson fan, and yet distilled, somehow even more specific, personal and resonant than the director’s already extensively pored-over oeuvre. Anderson arrived long ago — most triumphantly with There Will Be Blood — but One Battle After Another feels like a re-arrival. Critic Brian Haley has described it as Anderson’s ‘Dylan goes electric’ moment, and I’d be inclined to agree. The film finds the director darting down new avenues with absolute confidence — and yet we are always sure we are in the hands of that masterful filmmaker who brought us, well, The Master. Vital, silly, sincere, profound: without putting too fine a point on it, I’d say One Battle After Another is the film of the year, maybe the decade.
One Battle After Another is in cinemas now.