One Battle After Another reviewed: sensational and hysterical take on Pynchon’s counterculture yarn

Dissenting voices face their own challenges

Once upon a time it felt like Hollywood had a monopoly on channeling the dream life of America, what Norman Mailer called “that subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely, and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence”. Today that river is barely below the surface – it gushes right out of the sewers and straight down main street, via the relentless torrents of social media.

Dissenting voices face their own challenges. Networks are pulling talk show hosts, newspapers are firing columnists, and distributors are so shy of antagonising MAGA that films like A24’s The Sixth documentary, about the attempted 2021 insurrection, mysteriously vanish from schedules.

Nevertheless a distinctive Trump II cinema is emerging. This year’s best films – Nickel Boys, Sinners, 28 Years Later – and even some of its not so good – the scattershot Eddington, the portentous The Brutalist, the hokey Superman  – are in their various ways engaged in contesting or reframing the ongoing collective nightmare.

A film about terror and conspiracy, betrayal and redemption

Now Paul Thomas Anderson, who for thirty years has been the brightest hope of liberal American filmmaking, the one Gen X director who could maybe hold a candle to the raging bulls of Nixonian cinema, returns after detours into chamber pieces (Phantom Thread) and character sketches (Licorice Pizza)  with an honest to goodness $150 million, state of the nation blockbuster.

Adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s wistful, ominous 1990 novel Vineland, it’s a film about terror and conspiracy, betrayal and redemption.

Willa is a 16 year old girl growing up in the redwoods of North California with her paranoid dopehead of a dad. She has a hazy understanding that her parents were radical activists before she was born, but things become very real when she’s spirited away from her high school dance by a woman who claims to be an erstwhile comrade of her mom, who informs her that she’s being pursued by special forces. Turns out one particular agent – Col Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) – has a very intimate interest in her lineage, and will stop at nothing to establish the facts of the matter, even if Willa herself is collateral damage. She’s on the run for her life, with a series of maniacs, paranoids and assassins on her tail.

It is – appropriately, for a film concerned with the execution of strategic explosions – an absolute blast. Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Bob, the frazzled, hapless dad, capering across the rooftops in his ratty dressing gown, like a cross between The Dude and Tom Cruise, has not had so much fun since Catch Me If You Can.

Set to another high anxiety Jonny Greenwood score

Anderson, with the biggest budget of his career, clearly relishes access to what Orson Welles once called the biggest train set a boy could want, staging a series of elaborate high octane chase through the cities, suburbs and deserts of California, all set to another high anxiety Jonny Greenwood score. And the image of Teyana Taylor as the black power militant Perfidia Beverly Hills, eight months pregnant and spraying rounds from her Uzi, lingers long after the film has ended.

Could it be possible that One Battle After Another is too much fun? Sean Penn, who plays Colonel Lockjaw as a white knuckle black ops chief who can’t quite discipline his own cock, seems to have drifted in from a slightly different movie (specifically Dr Strangelove). The country club white supremacists above him, whose ranks he longs to join, are played for queasy laughs.

But most significantly in its breakneck pratfalls, shoot outs and madcap pursuits, the film doesn’t spend quite enough time with the people at the heart of the film. Vineland the book arrived after a long silence in Pynchon’s own career, at a time when he was issuing shy apologies for his earlier high concept doorstoppers. It was a book that for all its wandering across the borders between dreams and reality, life and death was rooted in the domestic realities of long, knotty, family histories.

It is sensational, dangerous and hysterical

Anderson says he waited patiently for an actor like Chase Infiniti before he could make One Battle After Another, but, short of widening those bush baby eyes, and kicking out furiously at a series of abductors, she’s given too little to do. In particular, the relationship between Willa, Bob and the errant Perfidia (who disappears after the first half hour, barely to return), feels underdeveloped, so that the ultimate resolution might strike you as a little pat.

But to tell that story might have required at least a couple of seasons of premium TV. As it is One Battle After Another is over two and half hours long, but roars by like a rollercoaster ride. It is sensational, dangerous and hysterical – the work of a director in his prime, rising to the challenge of his times. “You know what freedom is?” says the zen karate instructor Benicio Del Toro, before kicking Bill out of his speeding car. “It’s living without fear.” For all that it rolls off the rails and skids off the road, One Battle After Another is a fearless film.