One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson (2025)
Hold the front page – Leonardo DiCaprio gives a good performance! In Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, DiCaprio is a leftist political terrorist called Pat Calhoun – then, when he’s forced into assuming a new identity, Bob Ferguson. There’s a sixteen-year interval between the start of Pat’s existence as Bob and the larger part of the film’s narrative: even as the younger man, though, DiCaprio’s hitherto just-a-pretty face looks lived in and has natural mobility. When he shouts, as Pat/Bob often does throughout, there is, instead of the usual sound and fury signifying nothing, plenty of ambiguous feeling in his voice. DiCaprio also shows an aptitude for character-based comic movement, even if it’s not as blatantly funny as the dogged strut of his co-star, Sean Penn, who has his best role for some time as the hero’s nemesis, a corrupt though pathetic military man. One Battle After Another marks DiCaprio’s first appearance in a film by Anderson, who succeeds where Martin Scorsese has always failed (except in parts of The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)), in convincing this viewer that DiCaprio is a decent actor. For this alone, Anderson deserves a medal, and he may win an Oscar – his first – for One Battle After Another. Unlike most of his work to date, the film is overtly political. Despite its undue length (162 minutes), it holds your attention. It’s often clever and probably succeeds in its intentions. But Anderson’s slippery, dynamic flippancy makes it objectionable, too.
This is his tenth feature and only the third adapted from material previously published in another medium. The first exception was There Will Be Blood (2007), based on Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! Like the more recent exception, Inherent Vice (2015), One Battle After Another derives from a Thomas Pynchon novel, Vineland (1990). The jettisoning of Pynchon’s title is one indication that Anderson has moved much further away from his source than he did when bringing Inherent Vice to the screen. It’s worth comparing the timeframe of One Battle After Another with that of Vineland because Anderson’s approach to this is a crucial symptom of his playing fast-and-loose more generally. Vineland’s main action takes place in 1984, the year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election as US President; the main characters’ backstory dates to the late 1960s. Anderson’s film begins at a government-controlled detention centre for immigrants on California’s border with Mexico; ‘Ghetto’ Pat Calhoun and Perfidia ‘Beverly Hills’ (Teyana Taylor), key members of the far-left ‘French 75’ group, use violence to release immigrants from the centre. The French 75 modus operandi suggests domestic terrorist outfits like the Weathermen, active from 1969 into the mid-1970s, but Anderson doesn’t date the events on the Mexican border, which are seminal to all that follows. He specifies only (about fifty minutes into the action) the narrative jump forward of sixteen years, to when Bob Ferguson is in his mid- to late forties, drug dependent and paranoid. To the frustration of his teenage daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), Bob also struggles with mobile phone technology and the lexicon of gender diversity, which might suggest that ‘sixteen years later’ is approximately the present day – even though Weather Underground-style political activism was barely in evidence in noughties America.
The choice of title may hint at a subjective rather than historical timeframe – how Bob experiences his life – but Anderson is much more knowing than that. In simple cinematic terms, the film is what it says on the label – a series of variously spectacular, violent set pieces. As a political piece, One Battle After Another begins by placing radical activism associated with a particular past era in a setting – an immigrant detention centre – freighted with present-day political significance. In the sixteen-years-on narrative, it stages a confrontation between, on the one hand, a deranged army officer and a group of white supremacists and, on the other, sometime revolutionaries and, in the person of Willa, a non-white girl who’s remarkably brave and resourceful. Anderson, in other words, yokes two notorious episodes in America’s modern political history, eschewing chronological realism to stress more strongly the theme of recurring conflict between the forces of left and right, of right and wrong. And his knowingness pays off in two convergent ways.
A few films ago, and particularly in Inherent Vice, Anderson seemed, if not oblivious to, then unbothered by audience expectations. That has changed here. Although One Battle After Another was completed before Trump returned to power and has increased impact as a result of that return, Anderson’s screenplay must have been written in light of Trump’s first term (filming took place in the first half of 2024, when his prospects of a second term were on the rise). Anderson is well aware that his core audience is educated and/or liberal-minded and, on both counts, appalled by Trumpism. Much of that audience no doubt (and reasonably!) views the Trump regime as so noxious that the film’s technically nonsensical timeframe is for them a relatively minor consideration. The headline to a New York Times opinion piece a few days ago, says a lot: One Battle After Another is ‘An Antifascist Movie at a Fascist Moment’.
Anderson is audience-aware, too, in understanding that many viewers – perhaps especially younger ones – will find excitement in the film’s momentous implausibility. Things that don’t add up reinforce its ‘crazy’ energy, make it sensational fun – in the manner of last year’s runaway hit with audiences and Oscar voters, Sean Baker’s Anora. What’s more, knowing you’re watching something so lavishly unreal means you needn’t worry about the frequent bloodshed and can enjoy the cool anti-establishment terrorism (that, at least, is the idea). And while One Battle After Another doesn’t, as Anora did, lurch suddenly into supposed emotional sincerity, it’s nevertheless getting critical praise as a story about – eventually – real love within a family.
In the opening episode, Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the commanding officer at the border detention centre, is humiliated at gunpoint by Perfidia. Even as the French 75 carries out attacks on banks, politicians’ offices and power supplies, Lockjaw becomes sexually obsessed with Perfidia: ‘I love black women,’ he says, as if admitting his Achilles heel. He catches her planting a bomb but lets her off the hook in exchange for sleeping with him. In the meantime, Perfidia and Pat have started living together, and Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl, Charlene, but then rejects family life in favour of activism. After she’s captured during a bank robbery that goes wrong, Lockjaw enables Perfidia to live up to her name: she avoids time in jail by giving information on the French 75 and enters witness protection. Her informing leads to the death or imprisonment of numerous colleagues; it’s at this stage that Pat and baby Charlene go into hiding, as Bob and Willa, while Perfidia escapes from Lockjaw into Mexico. Sixteen years on, Lockjaw is desperate to join a white supremacist club known as the Christmas Adventurers but terrified his sexual history will come to light: it’s revealed that he is Willa’s biological father – which comes as news to her as well as to Bob. Lockjaw gets on the trail of them both, after hiring a bounty hunter, Avanti (Eric Schweig), and, through him, capturing one of Bob’s former comrades-in-arms (Paul Grimstead).
Deandra (Regina Hall), a loyal French 75-er, helps Willa escape a raid on her high-school dance by Lockjaw’s men. Bob’s avoidance of same, when they attack his home, can’t be helped by old colleagues as much as they’d like because he can’t remember all the French 75 passwords. (Anderson relies on these for grimly comic effect several times but it must be said the joke pays off repeatedly.) Sergio St Carlos (Benicio del Toro), a community leader who harbours illegal immigrants and is also Willa’s Taekwondo sensei, assists Bob as best he can. Deandra takes Willa to an order of revolutionary nuns, from whom she learns about her mother’s treachery. Bob literally falls into enemy hands but, with Sergio’s help, escapes jail. Willa is also captured and, on Lockjaw’s instructions, taken by Avanti to be killed by far-right mercenaries in their lair. On arrival there, the bounty hunter (an Indigenous American) has a change of heart, lets Willa go (though with her hands still bound together) and kills the prospective killers. The stage is set for a climactic car chase involving, in different vehicles, Willa, Lockjaw, a representative of the Christmas Adventurers called Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker), and, eventually, Bob.
All this gives an idea of the zany, action-packed mayhem that – despite several changes of tone and quieter interludes – dominates One Battle After Another. After shooting Lockjaw, whose car swerves off the road and plunges downhill, Smith mistakenly leaves him for dead. Willa shoots Smith fatally. Bob and Willa are incredulously reunited. Lockjaw incredibly rises again, though horribly facially disfigured. He’s subsequently welcomed into the Christmas Adventurers and shown to his office in their HQ, in which he’s locked and gassed to death, then cremated. The film’s closing scenes are very different, though. Back home, Bob gives Willa a letter that Perfidia left for her daughter. Its message of hope – ‘Maybe you will save the world’ – is read in voiceover and, apparently, without irony. In the closing scene, Willa sets off to drive to a presumably peaceful political protest in Oakland, California.
The film’s brilliantly fluent editing is by Andy Jurgensen. As well as the clever selection of pop and rock numbers that are the usual soundtrack to an Anderson movie, there’s another fine score by his go-to composer, Jonny Greenwood: the music has character and variety and always supports the action on screen. The dialogue includes a plethora of fucks but just as much wit (it compares very favourably with Anora in this department). The acting throughout the large cast is first rate. Some reviewers have complained that Sean Penn’s attention-grabbing performance is cartoonish. If your character’s name is Colonel Lockjaw (worthy of a place in the Dr Strangelove cast list), the temptation to overdo things must be strong, but Penn stays on the right side of caricature. I think the cartoon effect is partly the result of his amazing physical incarnation of this grizzled action man: Lockjaw is so musclebound that his movement is bound to look unnatural. Besides, Penn is far too talented an actor to withhold sympathy for the desperately needy man he’s playing, even though he makes Lockjaw a horror too. It’s worth also praising John Hoogenakker and those portraying the senior, inner circle of the Christmas Adventurers – Jim Downey, Tony Goldwyn, D W Moffett and Kevin Tighe – for resisting commentary on their characters. Their downplaying makes the villains they’re pretending to be more humanly believable – more potently vicious.
Even though Chase Infiniti has a lovely, open quality and makes Willa a very natural heroine, the but-seriously-now sentiment of the film’s final ambition for Willa is part of what leaves me uncomfortable with One Battle After Another. The French 75 takes its name originally from ‘the French 75-millimeter light field gun which due to its portability and rate of fire was the mainstay of the French army during the First World War’; it was in 1915 that the French 75 began life as a cocktail at the New York Bar in Paris. Paul Thomas Anderson (not Thomas Pynchon) is responsible for the names in the film; they’re chosen with care and the French 75 is no exception. Anderson knew very well that he was putting together a cocktail. For many, One Battle After Another is an intoxicating concoction, but I was relieved when it was over, and not only because a few gunshots, and even fewer car chases, go a long way with me. The film suffers from bravura overload and wilful moral confusion. So did Magnolia (1999) but Anderson was still finding himself as a filmmaker then, and his excesses were likeable. He’s cannier now and the result is more troubling.
2 October 2025