Old Yorker

  • One Battle After Another

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • The Ice Storm

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ang Lee (1997)

    After the well-deserved success of Sense and Sensibility (1995), his Hollywood breakthrough, Ang Lee directed a much more recent period drama.  Rick Moody’s novel The Ice Storm, first published in 1994, was adapted for the screen by Lee’s regular collaborator, James Schamus.  Set over the Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, The Ice Storm is a dysfunctional middle-class family tragicomedy.  Not a few of those were made, as contemporary film stories, in the late 1960s and early 1970s:  the New Hollywood was quick off the mark exploring grievously flawed familial relationships in movies as different as The Graduate (1967), Five Easy Pieces (1970) and Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (1973).  These pictures weren’t linked explicitly to recent or current national traumas – the Kennedy and King assassinations and, especially, Vietnam – but nonetheless tapped into a larger prevailing pessimism in America.  Placed in this context, The Ice Storm runs the risk of seeming surplus to requirements and secondhand, but you watch it hoping the passage of years may have enabled new insights into the period.  The hopes are disappointed:  Lee’s film is interesting chiefly in relation to those earlier zeitgeist pieces – and to Hollywood parent-children melodramas of an earlier vintage.

    By late 1973, Watergate and the sexual revolution were both in full swing.  They are, respectively, persistent background to and centre stage in The Ice Storm.  A television is often on in the homes of the Hoods and the Carvers, the two Connecticut families who supply all the film’s main characters; TV news reports are dominated by Watergate headlines, including statements by and interviews with Richard Nixon.  These place Lee’s narrative nearly as precisely in time as news film of the presidential motorcade in Dallas would have pinpointed a story set a decade earlier.  Fourteen-year-old Wendy Hood (Christina Ricci) is both vociferously anti-Nixon and into sexual experimentation or, at least, foreplay – with Mikey Carver (Elijah Wood) and his younger brother, Sandy (Adam Hann-Byrd), boys whom Wendy and her sixteen-year-old brother, Paul (Tobey Maguire), have known since childhood.  As she and Mikey are about to get it together, Wendy is delighted to spot a Nixon party mask lying on a nearby sofa.  She wears the grotesque mask throughout her session with Mikey until it’s interrupted by the unexpected entrance of Wendy’s father, Ben (Kevin Kline).  Ben is in the Carver house at the time because that’s where he conducts his secret affair with Mikey and Jim’s mother, Janey (Sigourney Weaver).  It’s not in fact much of a secret to Ben’s wife, Elena (Joan Allen), who suspects what’s going on, though Janey’s husband, Jim (Jamey Sheridan), doesn’t.  No one would mistake Jim, Elena or Ben for a swinger (though Janey is a different matter).  On the Friday night of Thanksgiving weekend, however, both couples are guests at a party that turns out to be a key party.

    The party also coincides with the storm that gives the film its title.  Like a lot of screen weather, this is heavily symbolic, rather as setting the story at Thanksgiving, highlight of the American family year, is freighted with (obvious) ironic meaning.  There are moments when the storm’s symbolic importance completely dominates its real implications:  no one at the key party suggests, in view of the freezing, dangerous weather conditions, that this may not, after all, be a good night for guests to head off with an unknown quantity in the driving seat.  For the younger generation, though, the storm does have actual consequences.  Paul, home for the weekend from his boarding school in New York, has returned there for the evening to pursue his courtship of a classmate, Libbets Casey (Katie Holmes), though when he arrives at her apartment, Paul finds Libbets already in the company of his boarding-school roommate, Francis Davenport (David Krumholtz).  Hours later, Paul dashes to Grand Central to catch the last train back to New Canaan (a real Connecticut town though this choice of location also has an ironic-symbolic flavour, given the milk-and-honey connotations of the biblical Canaan).  A power outage caused by the storm leaves Paul’s train stranded halfway between New York and New Canaan until next morning.  Mikey Carver, meanwhile, decides to wander through woodland, entranced by the beauty of the ice-covered trees, and to sit on a guardrail.  A falling tree takes down a power line that connects with the guardrail.  Mikey is fatally electrocuted.

    Unlike the three New Hollywood films mentioned above, The Ice Storm gives roughly equal screen time to parents and children.  Mike Nichols’ The Graduate is all about Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin Braddock:  his parents’ friend Mrs Robinson is a major character, of course, but only because she seduces Benjamin.  Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces is all about the Jack Nicholson character, Bobby Dupea, old enough to be a parent but childless:  Bobby is chiefly the drop-out son of an upper middle-class family; his father is now wheelchair-bound and deprived by illness of the power of speech.  In Gilbert Cates’ Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, Joanne Woodward’s Rita Walden is a wife and mother but her marriage receives more attention than her motherhood:  her two grown-up children have, in their different ways, escaped Rita’s soul-destroying world – the daughter by making a happier marriage of her own, the son by emigrating to Europe with his male lover.  The interval between when The Ice Storm is set and when the book and film appeared allows us to see its two generations from a different perspective.  In the mid-1990s, Paul, Wendy and Sandy would be roughly the same age their parents were in the mid-1970s, when Elena, Ben, Janey and Jim were near contemporaries of Bobby Dupea (albeit a decade or so older than Benjamin Braddock), and part of a newly permissive world.  Yet The Ice Storm still appears to blame the older generation for the younger’s difficulties – just as parents were to blame in films like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1961) and, indeed, The Graduate.

    Production notes for The Ice Storm, which were part of the BFI handout for this screening, refer to Ang Lee’s earlier films (set in both New York and Taipei but featuring mainly Asian or American-Asian characters), in which traditional and modernising attitudes are at odds but the father figure in the story is always ‘wise’ and ‘dignified’.  Those adjectives, say the notes, ‘are hardly the words to describe … befuddled anti-hero Ben Hood, or any of the other parents in the film, who are too preoccupied with their own need for “self-realisation” to set an example for their children’.  In the quote from Lee that follows, his tone is rather more forgiving:  ‘The whole nation is in an adolescent period, experimenting with new things, new rules – even the adults are behaving like adolescents’.  But that’s not the prevailing tone of The Ice Storm, which is less sympathetic than censuring of the ‘grown-ups’ – and lightened up only through presenting them, Ben especially, as laughable.

    Kevin Kline has a pretty thankless task – Ben is a pompous, uneasily jollifying windbag.  In bed with Janey, when he starts talking golf, she tells him to stop, that he’s a bore. She’s right but we already knew this about Ben.  Kline is at his best in the few bits where he’s able to act more simply and sincerely, as when, leaving the Carver place after their differently aborted sex sessions there, Wendy is too tired to walk further, her father carries her the rest of the way home, as he used to do when she was younger, and you feel Ben’s relief in experiencing loving nostalgia.  From the word go, Joan Allen’s Elena is so neatly competent and impersonal that it’s obvious the Hoods’ marriage has died well before that starts to be revealed in dialogue and incident.  Sigourney Weaver instantly magnetises the camera and is never less than striking but the narrative supplies no sense of why Janey is so thoroughly dissatisfied – or how, since there’s no suggestion that she feels constrained by convention, her loveless marriage could have lasted even in name.  Janey doesn’t seem keen on her children, let alone her husband.  The role of Jim is much smaller than that of the other three parents but at least Jamey Sheridan’s grief, when Mikey’s lifeless body is brought home, is affecting.  When that happens, Janey is still sleeping off the effects of the previous night’s party and its aftermath:  she gradually wakes, puzzled by the sound of her husband’s sobs, and that’s the last seen of her.  As it must be:  given how the character is written and played, the film’s tragic climax can’t accommodate Janey.

    Among the cast’s younger generation, Tobey Maguire is likeably good-humoured.  The quasi-sex scenes involving Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood and Adam Hann-Byrd – respectively sixteen, fifteen and fourteen when filming took place – might nowadays be thought questionable but that’s not the only reason why these sequences make for uncomfortable viewing.  Another is that the three young actors seem to have been cast for their somewhat eccentric looks (Christina Ricci was already famous for playing Wednesday in the two Addams Family films earlier in the decade).  Besides, Ang Lee directs these scenes uncertainly.  He handles the key party, and the selection of keys, with much more confidence.  He’s much helped by Allison Janney, in one of her earliest cinema roles – as Dot Halford, who hosts the party.  It’s a small part but Janney’s presence and brio are a shot in the arm to The Ice Storm every second she’s on screen.  Dot is avidly interested in who gets whose keys yet never stops being the perfect, considerate hostess.

    The script is persistently overwritten.  (Not having read the source material, I don’t know how much this is a legacy of the novel.)  The film begins with Paul on his long-delayed train journey home, looking at a comic book.  His voiceover explains that in the November 1973 issue of the Fantastic Four:

    ‘Reed Richards has to use his antimatter weapon on his own son who Annihilus has turned into a human atom bomb.  It was a typical predicament for the Fantastic Four because they weren’t like other superheroes; they were more like a family. And the more power they had, the more harm they could do to each other without even knowing it.  That was the meaning of the Fantastic Four:  that a family is like your own personal antimatter.  Your family is the void you emerge from and the place you return to when you die.  And that’s the paradox:  the closer you’re drawn back in, the deeper into the void you go.’

    As the monologue reaches its end, the train pulls into New Canaan station:  Paul’s parents and sister are on the platform to meet him.  Next comes a teaching session, where Libbets impresses not just Paul with her looks but also their teacher with her insights into Dostoyevsky and existentialism.  A few screen minutes later, Elena happens to see Wendy riding her bicycle along a street in New Canaan and, at home that evening, tells her daughter that she ‘looked very free when I saw you, as if I were seeing my own memories of being a girl … there was something internal about it’.  By this stage, you’re getting suspicious that the characters are speaking with essentially the same voice – an educated voice that seems anxious to convince you how clever the dialogue’s author is too.  In one of the film’s clumsiest bits, Elena, after envying Wendy’s youthfulness, gets on a bike herself, then goes to a store where she also tries and fails to emulate her daughter by shoplifting (not that Elena saw Wendy shoplifting).  Where Wendy stared down the accusatory looks of a woman shopper, her mother is called out by a store detective and shamefully admits her theft – further proof, presumably, that Elena is no longer a carefree teenager.  There’s no follow-up whatsoever to her petty crime.

    Ang Lee’s background and earlier work encouraged reasonable expectations that he would bring to this account of materially comfortable WASP lives in the 1970s a curious but understanding outsider’s eye – as he did to Sense and Sensibility.  Sad to say, The Ice Storm mostly comes across as a routine treatment of failed and faithless adult relationships, of adolescent explorations of sex and drugs (the latter in the sequence chez Libbets).  Some of the film’s best moments are supplied by effective rhyming images.  Paul desperately sprints down a slope at Grand Central to catch his train; Mikey ecstatically slides down an icy woodland declivity on his back, moments before sitting on the guardrail.  Ben carries Wendy home on the afternoon before the storm begins, lifts Mikey’s corpse from the woods in the first light of the morning after.  Cinematographer Frederick Elmes makes the accumulations of ice extraordinarily beautiful, whether in nighttime landscapes or on a train undercarriage.  (The domestic interiors sometimes seem underlit, though.)  The other half of the BFI handout was Lizzie Francke’s Sight and Sound (February 1998) review of The Ice Storm.  Francke admiringly illustrates visual aspects of the period mise-en-scène – ‘crocheted tank tops’, the ‘discordant mix of two-or-so decades’ funishings’ in the Hoods’ home, the Carvers’ ‘cool Philip Johnson-style glass house that ostensibly signals openness about their lives’.  I admit these things passed me by, but I still think they provide no more than dramatic context.

    When Lee eventually turns up the sympathy dial, it’s too late in the day.  The gathering at the entrance to the Carvers’ home, when Mikey is returned there, is no more than a tableau of grief, scored to Mychael Danna’s suddenly sensitive music.  The narrative then returns to its starting point, for Paul to set foot on the platform and his family to break the news to him about Mikey.  In the closing sequence, the four Hoods are in their car; Ben sobs and Elena tries to comfort him, in what seems a shared outburst of contrition.  The emotion feels artificial and the scene fails to move.  But it does remind you how far Ang Lee progressed to deliver the wrenching finale to Brokeback Mountain (2005), as Heath Ledger buttoned that shirt, adjusted that postcard and closed the cupboard door.

    26 September 2025

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