‘One Battle After Another’ Is Crazy, Funny, Action-Packed

Leonard DiCaprio as the drug-hazed revolutionary searching for his daughter in ‘One Battle After Another.’

With undulating hilly roads over-emphasized by camera focusing, with quick-edited action sequences and slow-motion lingering over brutal imprisonments, One Battle After Another creates an alternate action-defiance universe out of the real turmoil over immigrants in the US.

At the same time, without bothering with normal psychological niceties in performance, just letting extreme characters behave as they obsessively would, the darkly comedic thriller reminds moviegoers of the post-apocalypse world of the Mad Max movies.

All are within the talents and oeuvre of Paul Anderson Thomas, responsible for the great There Will Be Blood, the fascinating Phantom Thread, the cropper The Master and now, as both director and writer, he is raising specters of revolutionaries past and present.

It starts bluntly as sex and action-crazed Perfidia (Teyana Taylor with dominating glare and attitude, relishing her own black power and control of men and guns) leads a revolutionary attack on a US border detention system. She is with her adoring partner, technical wizard and bomb expert Bob, also known as Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio), and then she gleefully participates in dynamite and bank attacks against the white establishment.

Along the way, making his erection explode under his ICE uniform, she conquers fanatic gargoyle-faced rightie, Captain then Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). He in turn captures her.

The movie plays games throughout with how desperate people run frantically away from military goons or are shot casually, yet how readily in this corrupt world some just walk away from captivity with the right help. The children escaping into the “underground railroad” are routine observers of this chaos.

Perfidia does walk away and disappears, and the plot turns to her baby – is it hers with revolutionary DiCaprio? Or with the ramrod Lockjaw who demands sex and lets her free on bond?

The film jumps ahead 15 years revealing the baby, now a young woman named Willa, winningly played by Chase Infiniti. She is partly ignorant about her past and her mother, but accepts the now bong-addled Bob as her dad as he lectures her through clouds of smoke. She is being protected by a network of revolutionaries who use off-the-radar devices and community action.

Meanwhile the white supremist leaders in executive suits or military garb are warring amongst themselves in social chats about who is more racially pure and more violent. And now I have gone as deeply into the One Battle After Another plot as is humanely sane, though Anderson is also playing with echoes of the 1960s Weathermen and the 1970s Symbionese Liberation Army, reminding us how those impulses live on today. The film’s credits say it was “Inspired by the novel ‘Vineland’ by Thomas Pynchon,” but it retains only certain elements of the book.

This is not one of DiCaprio’s star-name roles, but he is central to the action and has loads of histrionics puffing smoke and running to and from trouble. The one-time rebel leader has retreated into a bong-filled haze to the point that he can’t remember the security codes he himself established decades ago, one of the funniest and most profane interludes in the film.

The private Penn is noted for his progressive positions, so understandably he uses satire and butt-wiggling buffoonery as the tightly muscular, creepy Lockjaw who represents everything Penn hates in real life – and he is mesmerizing. The over-the-top elements are delightful and fit right in with the director’s intent. Benicio del Toro plays the always calm, always beer-drinking Mexican leader of the underground, so smoothly that we wish he had more to do. Newcomer Infiniti makes a vivid impression as the watchful teenager who grows into her own revolutionary presence.

This is a movie that may play around too much in establishing its own world – a world that echoes ours — but I would willingly watch it again.

Released in several theaters in September and now ensconced on HBO Max while expecting more theatrical bookings after awards time, it was so expensive and so hard to explain that it didn’t blow the competition out of the water as expected from its star power. But time has brought clarity to its themes and artistic acceptance of its style. Director Anderson has a vision worth exploring.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blog here and here. For his Dom’s Snippets, an unusual family history and memoir, go to domnoth.substack.com