One Battle After Another: A Much-Needed Shock to Hollywood

It’ll be difficult separating the conversation around One Battle After Another from its staggering $130M budget—the largest of Paul Thomas Anderson’s career. In a period where major studios seem to be hemorrhaging cash on questionable bets, Warner Bros.’ decision to bankroll Anderson’s loose, audacious adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “unadaptable” Vineland into a bold political thriller filled with characters named “Col. Lockjaw” and “Junglepussy” feels like either madness or a rare stroke of genius. While it’s not quite on Inherent Vice levels of surreal wackiness, Anderson’s latest is another left turn from a filmmaker whose next step has always been impossible to predict. An epic achievement in its own right, One Battle After Another is Anderson’s most urgent work since Boogie Nights, mirroring his youthful rebellion while directly challenging the notion that “you become more conservative as you grow up.” It’s unflinching, current, and deeply personal, staking its claim in the modern Western canon beside No Country for Old Men and Eddington.

The story begins in the late 2000s and early 2010s with the revolutionary French 75 attempting to free immigrants at the Mexico–U.S. border. Leading the operation is Perfidia Beverly Hills, a self-assured, rageful fighter who gains dimension through Teyana Taylor’s short, unseasoned performance, which suggests she enjoys power as much as justice. During the raid, she humiliates Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, dialing up comical evil), sparking a decades-long psychosexual obsession that briefly becomes romantic. After years of revolution with Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), the two have a child, Willa.

Years later, Bob Ferguson has gone into hiding with a now sixteen-year-old Willa (Chase Infiniti), in the small town of Baktan Cross, California. After years of fatherhood, he has curdled into a couch-bound conspiracy crank, splitting his time between vape clouds, old war movies, and chauffeuring Willa to karate. One day, Lockjaw is initiated into a secret group of white nationalists, however, he fears his past with Perfidia may come back to haunt him through Willa. Trouble eventually arrives at Bob’s doorstep as Lockjaw’s search is accompanied by raids and the deployment of agent provocateurs to pull the remaining French 75 from the shadows. With the help of karate sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Del Toro) and a stubborn French 75 hotline operator who won’t reveal the group’s location to a stoned, forgetful Bob who has lost track of passwords, it’s up to him to save his daughter.

The magic of One Battle After Another is how accessible and fun it is, as Paul Thomas Anderson keeps his eye on the story, deploying great performances (who would’ve known both Andersons would cash in on the belief that Del Toro had the right comedic chops, playing off his on-screen persona as an infinitely capable man?) and bending the tone to his will. Like Stanley Kubrick before him, Anderson’s prestigious arthouse status has distracted audiences from the fact that his films are almost always hilarious—One Battle After Another certainly is. Though claims of it being PTA’s first action movie may be overblown, its tension comes from excellent pacing, as intersecting threads leave questions dangling. Meanwhile, Jonny Greenwood’s score is his finest in years, with discordant piano notes and untuned violins reminiscent of There Will Be Blood, building tension over Andy Jurgensen’s ever-moving VistaVision cameras, adding newfound scale to Anderson’s beautifully textured images.

What continues to make the film even sharper is how it hijacks Western tropes to comment on America today. The border raid that kicks off the film feels like a classic siege flipped inside out—not settlers protecting land, but a scrappy coalition breaking cages. Where the Western once mythologized “civilization” taming wilderness, One Battle After Another suggests the wilderness has always been inside America’s institutions—that the so-called lawmen were the outlaws. The result is a film that doesn’t just join the Western canon but mutates it, using the genre’s framework to expose how much old myths still structure our politics.

Like a young filmmaker eager to get every idea out on the page (i.e., Boogie Nights), there’s a newfound propulsive energy and congestion of politically charged images throughout from a director who has long fought to conceal his political leanings—a shift in voice that feels sharper because this is his first present-day story since Punch-Drunk Love. Although themes of redemption, found family, and caretaking have remained constant in Anderson’s work, One Battle After Another is his first film explicitly about parenting and the first to present a clear, unambiguous depiction of evil through white supremacists. Even Daniel Plainview had chances of redemption. As a father of four married to a Black woman, the topic likely strikes close to home for Anderson.

Conversely, while PTA is comfortable writing despicable characters and recognizing stoic faces that make good punchlines (every joke at Penn’s expense lands), the father-daughter relationship between Bob and Willa struggles to land. Both actors are excellent—DiCaprio continues to find his best work post-Oscar as bumbling losers, and Infiniti delivers a star-making debut—but the stock dynamic leans on laughs over sentiment, keeping their fates unpredictable yet draining the film of lasting emotional weight. Only once they are separated does the film begin unraveling what Willa does and doesn’t know about her father’s past. Yet, for a film so explicitly about white supremacy, it’s bizarre that it never lets Bob—or anyone—grapple with the fact that Lockjaw’s motivation to capture his Black daughter is fuelled by his desire to be initiated into a white-supremacist group.

Ferguson—and, by extension, Paul Thomas Anderson himself—may be growing older, weary of the absurdity and exhaustion of their worlds, but there’s an unshakable spark that reignites when they look at their children. Remarkably, this chaos coalesces into an exciting crowd-pleaser with one finger on the zeitgeist, inviting audiences to cheer for destructive acts of political liberation by pregnant Black women and stoned, vaping fathers—placing the film between a Coen Brothers caper and a Spike Lee joint—without ever feeling like it’s from a man in his fifties.

While not without minor flaws, One Battle After Another is a breath of fresh air that delivers a much-needed shock to Hollywood. Though it may not be Paul Thomas Anderson’s greatest film, it is still one of the decade’s greatest, extending the director’s generational run.

still courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures

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J.A. Birney

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