I feel betrayed by One Battle After Another. I’ve been telling myself for weeks that I should get over my own hang-ups and enjoy it for what it is – a well-crafted action movie – but I can’t manage the required mental rotation.
(Note: this post contains no spoilers, but I confess that it is kind of an attempt to spoil the movie for you in a deeper sense.)
Paul Thomas Anderson is my favorite filmmaker. I love PTA’s work primarily because it so deeply explains how individual personalities and larger social structures have interacted to create California as we know it today. The crowning achievement so far is There Will be Blood, followed closely by The Master. Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights are also compelling and move the story forward in time. Magnolia portrays a kind of end-state of the ambition, recklessness, delusion, passion, greed, isolation, and creativity that runs through all of these films.
In contrast to all of the above work, One Battle After Another tells a fundamentally dishonest story. The overarching narrative is ahistorical and distorting. In addition – with only a few exceptions – the characters are all one-dimensional action-movie stereotypes. This is a double whammy.
To be clear: I do not require all of PTA’s movies to fit into my personal “California history” series. Punch-Drunk Love is the movie that led me to fall in love with his work, and it is primarily a character study (set in Los Angeles). Phantom Thread is a masterpiece, and it is purely a very complex love story, set far from California. In principle, One Battle After Another could have told a fantasy story about California but been full of multidimensional characters, and I would have been happy.
Well, maybe not entirely happy. One Battle After Another clearly does strive to serve as commentary on the political situation in the US, and it was always going to be impossible for me to ignore how wrong its premises are. I suspect the fundamental sin was drawing on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. That book was written about 35 years ago, and most of the action takes place 30 years before that – the 1960s. The 1960s had its share of militant left-wing groups, and PTA is exactly the artist I would pick to explore how those groups formed and operated.
However, rather than setting One Battle After Another in that time period, PTA simply moved everything forward in time about 40 years and made superficial changes to their circumstances and motivations. The thing to explain was why those 60s-era left-wing militant groups didn’t survive into the present day, but instead we are asked to believe that they did, and in a hyper-competent, professionalized way that allows them to perform daring James Bond-level operations. It’s the antifa that the right has been describing but been unable to produce.
As I said, I could partly forgive this if the characters were compelling. I’ve read some reviews that describe One Battle After Another as a movie about fatherhood. Okay, but then why did it have to include the lamentable trope of modern movie-making where the dangerously irresponsible father is abusive and threatening to his daughter’s new boyfriend? Here, as in all the schlock before it, we are supposed to take the father’s side, and feel no sense of irony when the father proceeds to ruin his own daughter’s life (and the lives of many others). The version of this tired tale that One Battle After Another tells is funny enough (though, even by the standards of the genre, very nasty), but it’s not true or insightful.
There is an even worse scene later. Our hero is abusive on the phone with another member of his militant group, and that person is offended and reacts in a pathetic, whiny way. Now, look, conditional on this left-wing militant group existing at all in the current moment, it is perfectly reasonable to imagine that its members would have strong views about workplace ethics, respectful modes of interaction, “triggering behavior”, and all the rest. However, these are also militants who do extremely violent things outside of the law. They would not be pathetic and whiny about these matters – they would be fearsome and unrelenting. PTA and I are roughly the same age, so I feel like I can say this: the whole scene comes off as him complaining about young people while getting some cheap laughs from the audience.
Could I go on from here? I suppose, but the movie descends into pure action-movie mode that doesn’t really merit close analysis. An equally absurd right-wing group appears, but it seems so short-staffed (despite vast resources) that one of its top members has to be sent out to assassinate someone (in a cool muscle car). There are some more scenes that I recognize from other action movies in which characters who are in impossibly dangerous situations nonetheless do funny and immature things to make the audience smile. All of this is so far from what I want from PTA that I will not dwell on it. The bright spots are Benicio del Toro (as always) and Sean Penn, who perfectly manifests a Pynchon-style caricature.
The final thing I want to say is that there is one incredibly compelling character in the movie: Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. Both the character and the performance are riveting. Perfidia is a true revolutionary and a purist, but also a selfish pragmatist with her own tangled relationship to power and to her own causes. There is so much to unpack and explore, and Teyana Taylor brings all these strengths and contradictions out so richly. Twenty minutes into the movie, she describes an entire philosophy in an intense and moving scene about motherhood, individuality, loyalty, and revolution.
Soon after this, she disappears from the movie entirely except as a very distant and unexamined presence. She could have been the heart of a PTA movie that would have fit directly into the larger California narrative of personalities and institutions. Perhaps, since One Battle After Another is technically an action movie, there could be a sequel, or PTA could do one of those “extended universe” things about Perfidia’s life.