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One Battle After Another
Verdict: The next time we hear Paul Thomas Anderson might be when he holds aloft an Academy Award
Now that he’s turned 50 and his baby-faced good looks have faded, Leonardo DiCaprio is becoming an expert at playing middle-aged men gone to seed.
He did so brilliantly in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), and nails it again as a jaded left-wing revolutionary in the glorious One Battle After Another, a dynamic satirical thriller certain to be in the conversation when awards season comes round.
Yet DiCaprio’s is not even the most eye-catching performance in Paul Thomas Anderson’s irresistibly funny, thunderously exhilarating film.
Sean Penn pinches every scene he’s in as an unhinged army officer, driven first by lust and later by loathing, whose downfall, when it comes, is one of the most startling things you will see in the cinema this year.
Anderson has already made one of the best pictures of the 21st century, in 2007’s There Will be Blood. This one, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, is comparably fine.
It begins on the US-Mexico border at a detention centre for illegal immigrants, where security is upheld by a band of soldiers commanded by Penn’s character, Captain Steven J Lockjaw.
Outside the fence, there’s a group of angry radicals planning to set the immigrants free.
Calling themselves the French 75, they are led by the memorably-named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), an Amazonian African-American who is both highly politicised and highly sexed.
Even in the throes of violent insurrection she cannot keep her hands off her man, explosives expert Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio).
The French 75 are a kind of US version of the Baader-Meinhof gang, bombing offices and robbing banks.
But eventually Perfidia is caught, and part of her plea-bargaining strategy is sex with the lustful, repellent Lockjaw. He is well-named. Penn has a blast with his facial mannerisms, jutting his chin and grinding his jaw like Desperate Dan on steroids.
Sixteen years pass. Perfidia has disappeared into the Witness Protection Programme, leaving Bob to bring up their teenage daughter, Willa (played by a supremely talented newcomer, Chase Infiniti), on his own.
Against the odds, he’s done a decent job. Willa is serenely confident and resourceful. But without Perfidia, Bob has become a booze-sodden, drug-addled shadow of the urban guerilla he used to be.
‘I know how to drink and drive, honey,’ he indignantly tells Willa, when she upbraids him for coming home under the influence.
Anderson pokes relentless, hilarious fun at Bob and his type, the leftie firebrand whose fire has burnt out, and who now can’t keep up with what you can and can’t say to the next generation about gender ‘fluidity’.
The only fuse the bomb-maker lights these days is by using the wrong pronouns. One of the joys of this film is that it satirises, with equal vigour, both the extreme left and the far right. They are both made to look ridiculous.
The latter group is represented by a sinister cabal of wealthy white supremacists who call themselves the Christmas Adventure Club.
Lockjaw, now a colonel, is desperate to join their ranks but there is a potential problem: interracial relationships are strictly prohibited, yet it’s just possible that he, not Bob, is Willa’s biological father. He needs to know.
The rest of the movie plays out as a genuinely suspenseful thriller, leavened by moments of pure comedy.
Lockjaw must capture Willa so he can force a DNA test on her, while Bob must protect her, easier said than done now that in his druggy haze he’s forgotten all the code words he needs to mobilise his former comrades in the French 75.
Happily, Willa’s martial-arts teacher, impeccably played by Benicio Del Toro, is willing to help.
None of this unfolds with what you would call brevity; the film, beautifully scored by Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood, Anderson’s regular musical collaborator, is closer to three hours long than two.
But then there’s a lot of story to tell, and some huge performances to savour. There are also a couple of superbly-choreographed car chases, the best I’ve seen in years.
At Tuesday evening’s premiere in London, Anderson took the stage beforehand, alongside his illustrious cast.
But he did not waste time long-windedly telling us how proud he was of his film, or expressing the hope, as directors normally do at premieres, that we would love it.
He knows he’s made something special, indeed the next time we hear him might be when he holds aloft an Academy Award.
One Battle After Another is in cinemas next Friday
