One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson Delivers the Movie-est Movie of the Year

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, loosely adapted — and quite gloriously overreached.

While Quentin Tarantino dithers around trying to figure out what his tenth and (allegedly) final film will be, it turns out that Paul Thomas Anderson has gone and made it for him. One Battle After Another crackles and sparks like Tarantino’s best while benefitting enormously from Anderson’s near-supernatural ability to combine character, plot, and directorial vision into a wildly enjoyable but still substantive movie.

Leonardo DiCaprio has rarely been better than as the brain-fried revolutionary Bob, lurching from one pickle to the next in pursuit of his kidnapped daughter Willa, played with vengeance and vulnerability by the wonderful (and fabulously named) Chase Infiniti. In permanent dragged-backwards-through-a-hedge mode, DiCaprio is note-perfect in presenting a man who is constantly out of his depth but either too confuzzled or too determined to give up. There are shades here of Nicolas Cage’s H.I. McDunnough from the Coen Bros’ Raising Arizona. Bob and H.I. are cut from the same baffled cloth, both compelled to do good while having a God-given knack for fucking it all up. Bob’s wildly unkempt hair has a strong echo of H.I.’s as well. They’d get along just fine.

Benicio Del Toro is equally magnificent as Sensei Sergio, the calm inside DiCaprio’s storm. He steadies the film, providing a centre when the unrelenting mayhem might start to wear on the nerves. And when was the last time Sean Penn was this good? His Colonel Lockjaw lands somewhere between a T-1000 and Tony Abbott with a fresh onion — a terrifying combination indeed.

As always, though, with a PTA film, the show’s the thing — and what a show it is. This is the movie-est movie you’ll see all year. Its two-hour-and-forty-minute running time somehow flies by in about ninety minutes. Just take a moment to appreciate the fact that you are alive on the planet at the exact same time that PTA is making movies. What are the odds!? Embrace your good fortune.

And yet, for all the giddy joy that the movie brings, it has weight at the heart of it. It’s pissed off at the state of the union, at the creepy white dudes ruining everything for everyone, at the sheer brazen cruelty that the powerful inflict on the vulnerable in the name of God and country. Bob, it suggests, might not know where he is or what he’s doing, but he’s at least doing something. Bob is kicking down walls — and maybe, really, isn’t that what we should all be doing right now?

One Battle After Another deserves to be seen in the cinema with other people. It’s a movie — not just content, but an actual, bona fide, honest-to-goodness movie. Grab it while you can.