This is very complicated review to write without giving up to much. The movie is at the same time incredibly complex and achingly simple.
Each of the 6 main characters, regardless of their screen time, is challenged deeply and goes through their own journey - and of course, the shared journey - during the course of the film’s 2 hours and 40 minutes.
What is not apparent from the marketing and is unavoidable in the film is that Leo DiCaprio’s Bob and Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw - character names so appropriately evocative that they could be considered onomatopoeia - are really two sides of the same coin, doppelgangers of a sort.
They are both consumed by - and there is no other way to say this - black ass. Perfidia Beverly Hills’ black ass to be specific, in an indelible performance by Teyana Taylor.
Before I try to dig myself out of this rhetorical hole - based 100% on the story of the movie and actual dialogue in the film - an aside to clarify another character name that fits like a bondage glove (is there such a thing?)…
Perfidia
written by Alberto Dominguez
I have looked for you wherever I go,
and I can’t find you,
why do I want other kisses
If your lips don’t want to kiss me now
And you,
who knows where you will go
who knows what adventures you will have
how far you are from me.
Or if you prefer, from the Nat King Cole translation…
With a sad lament my dreams
Have faded like a broken melody
While the Gods of love look down and laugh
At what romantic fools, we mortals be
And now, I know my love was not for you
And so I’ll take it back with a sigh
Perfidia’s one goodbye
One of the dangerous things for the studio would be to embrace the sexualization by and of Perfidia in the marketing. I get that. But it is the primary driver of the movie…. for some, just until the third act… for others until the very end of the film. Simple human desire. Teyana isn’t just twerking her way through the performance. Her Perfidia is a rich character and the performance is award worthy… but in terms of story, it is that sexual side of her that is the gunpowder of the film.
The first thing we see in the film is Perfidia doing recon on some kind of military operation under a freeway in California. It will turn out to be a immigration camp. This opening - really a long prologue - is set 16 years before the primary time of the movie. Time is somewhat elastic in Paul Thomas Anderson’s world here. The revolutionaries that Perfidia and Bob are part of feel like they are from the late 60s or early 70s. The immigration issue, both in the prologue and the main part of the film, feel like they are from sometime since 2010. Reconciling the idea of a 16 years space in between would make Einstein stroke out. But that isn’t the point. Give this piece of art some room to breathe.
During the assault on the immigration camp, we meet Bob, who already feels like he doesn’t quite fit with the group of young revolutionary-minded adults. He seems a little too old… a little too enthusiastic… and a bit too stoned to be playing with weapons. And indeed, he is relegated to distraction more than the fight.
We also meet Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, who is “captured” in his tent, asleep, but Perfidia. Whatever instant madness is unleashed, Perfidia sexualizes the encounter, perhaps because she instantly senses the power her sexuality has over Lockjaw… perhaps because it turns her on too.
Bob is a warm place that turns her on, a comfortable, tall, good looking white boy who will follow her like a puppy, embracing and appreciating her power. Lockjaw is an open flame threatening to burn her alive, which for a person who loves the danger and whose ego assumes she can control the heat, also irresistible.
Thus the stage is set for the rest of the movie… the main part of the movie. Perfidia starts the timer on the inevitable explosion… and then is gone. The story picks up 16 years later.
And I tell you, dear reader, I have barely scratched the surface of that first 20-ish minutes of the film, much less the bulk of the story here.
I will not walk you through the story of what happens 16 years later. It would be a criminal act. You should enjoy every twist and turn. Maybe we will all discuss it in a few weeks, after people who want to absorb the film have had the opportunity.
But what I will tell you - what the ads have told you, mostly - is that Perfidia’s 16-year-old daughter (Willa, played by Chase Infiniti) and her dad, Bob, are living a very normal boring life in a town (played by Sacramento) surrounded by nature. Bob maintains some level of paranoia, though he spends so much time getting stoned, he isn’t as sharp as he used to be. Willa is a bright, beautiful, somewhat sheltered 16-year-old girl whose friend group tends to be the glorious freaks of her high school.
But Lockjaw, having given up a bit on ever finding Perfidia, is given new reason to seek her and hers out, as he seeks to become a Christmas Adventurer. What is a Christmas Adventurer? Without giving too much away, it is a leadership group with all kinds of lifetime benefits that hinges on a form of absolute purity, which does not include miscegeny, aka sexual encounters of any kind with any non-white person.
The audience knows what Lockjaw is into. The audience knows what Lockjaw has done. But no one else in the movie does. The action of the next 2 hours or so is driven by him trying to keep it that way.
And it’s about Bob, trying to keep the world that he and his daughter have been happily cocooned in, more or less the same, perhaps in a different cocoon.
Can this schmuck find a way to save himself and his daughter from this walking war machine of relentless aggression? Go to the movie.
Spielberg now-famously compared the film to Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. I don’t agree with that assessment. Perfect as it is, Strangelove is more simple, storywise, than One Battle After Another and in its transgression, more shocking. There is more than a little Kubrick in Paul Thomas Anderson, but this film feels a lot more like Lolita or Full Metal Jacket or even A Clockwork Orange to me. The movie is a journey that the characters didn’t expect to be on, but feels more and more unavoidable as they try to find their way back to something making sense again.
The Kubrick examples… Humbert is “followed” by Quilty as the central figure of focus, Lolita, just is… until she evolves on her own. Gunnery Sargent Hartman seems like the obstacle, but Pyle shows them that it’s the madness of war… and then they spend the rest of the movie in a journey through that madness. And Alex and his buddies are just romping through life, abusing people for kicks when The World, which is as bent as they are in a very different way, kick back and mindlessly destroy the good and the bad, unqualified to and/or unable to separate them.
In the midst of Bob and Lockjaw and Willa’s journey, we meet Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos… a man of many talents. What is wonderful about about this character, aside from Del Toro’s overwhelming charm, is that he is a reflection of both of our two main characters. He is not militaristic like Lockjaw, though he is similarly organized and skilled at the many things he does. And he is not a lazy rebel like Bob, as The Sensei, for all his calm, is fighting the good fight every day of his life while also finding space for family and love and peace. He is, in a way, the super-cool fairy godmother of the story.
The last of the 6 main characters is Regina Hall’s Deandra, who is from the original group with Perfidia and Bob, The French 75 (a Tarantino name if ever there was one), and who is activated on this track when Lockjaw gets reactivated. At one point a character (who has not been named here) tells her that she is tougher than the rest. (It’s the wrong specific word… sorry… but you get it.) She is that person who is 100% committed, super intelligent, selfless, and overflowing with love without being mushy.
One of the things about a Paul Thomas Anderson film is that you know he is willing to go anywhere, so you don’t trust that he will ever go where you are expecting. But it never feels like he is just doing it to trick you. This is just what happens.
I find this film notable in that it is reminiscent of his previous Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice, but it’s like Anderson looked at that film with as much objectivity as a director can have and decided to give this film all the joyous madness in terms of character actions, but to make sure the story was more accessible for all audiences, not just for people who claimed they read Pynchon. Make no mistake. One Battle After Another is a wild ride. But it makes, all said and done, solid narrative sense. Some of the details may take a moment or 20 to settle in. But every step forward and every twist changing those steps and then the next steps actually make sense.
For me, as a for instance, some of the things that Sensei Sergio is up to within the frame but outside the context of the main story became much clearer to me in the 2nd viewing. As a 1st time viewer, I was focused on what was happening to Bob… his journey and how Sensei is trying to help him. But that 2nd time around, I could see that Sensei had a lot of stuff going on, some of it triggered by Bob’s situation, but also things Bob has nothing to do with, and that he was managing that track of his actions at the same time he was managing Bob’s next steps. And this is one of the areas in which Anderson’s directorial skills are most thrilling.
The last issue I want to discuss is the politics about the film. Coming off the Kimmel situation and with AppleTV+ delaying the release of The Savant because the show involves the tracking of fictional right wing political violence, just how much political drama is created by One Battle After Another will create is going to be really interesting.
I left Perfidia in the Sean/Leo image above to amuse myself. The images here are from the opening “prologue.” But this is the only character image on the WB press materials site of the Lockjaw character. Notice that he is not in an official-looking military outfit, which he often wears in the film. I believe this is self-protective by the studio, not wanting to poke the bear by showing him in full military gear until it is unavoidable.
My point is… Lockjaw is the military right. It’s undeniable. He has a rebellious lock of hair that lives over his crew cut, but he is hard-right, serious military. He is also excessively violent and willing to kill (a lot) to cover his own tracks.
Bob is the activist lefty rebel in the track suit… and this is him pretty much at his most dressed up in the film.
But my position on the film, even though one guy is clearly on the extreme left and the other is on the extreme right, is that it is not really a political movie.
But how can I say this? The movie is mostly built on this ongoing conflict between the military right and the lefty rebels… of course it is political. And yeah, I can’t claim otherwise.
One Battle After Another is set in this world of people fighting for “their side.” But more than anything, it is a story about individuals and their needs, not their politics. The specific politics of The French 75, which seem very familiar, are never really examined. We see them doing a few acts against The Man. But there is almost no conversation in the film about the politics.
Likewise, the powers that empower Lockjaw in this film are familiar archetypes… but the real political objectives are not much discussed. And much of the time, the actions of the military in the film is just soldiers repeating their deeply trained roles, not acting with political purpose (or even known to be happening by the government). Much of the “right wing” action is, actually, beyond the official military.
Perfidia is all rebel, all the time. But what she is faced with pushes her in ways that have nothing to do, ultimately, with The Cause.
Lockjaw is all soldier, all the time… except when Perfidia comes into his life… and that influence will overwhelm everything else he does for many years.
Bob seems to be earnest about being a rebel… but he also seems to be there for the girl and ultimately, his revolutionary training is mostly a tool by which he can try to keep his daughter safe. This is the story, in part, of a desperate parent.
It’s one of the things I most love about the film. It’s not about dogma, even if the characters are drawn, if only on the surface, as near-caricatures. It’s about when you are committed very specific ideas in your public life, but then your humanity… your basic human needs… your animal brain… take control in a way that is beyond your intellectual control.
It’s a wild ride. There are a lot of set pieces and almost none are quite anything you have ever seen in a film before. None of it seems extraneous. And God knows, you will never guess the connections from one “event” to another. I’ve seen the movie twice and the 2nd view felt as fresh as the 1st because the Rube Goldberg of it all is so great. Again… characters I have not mentioned are likely to offer you some of your favorite moments of the movie.
I’m not going to get deep into the awards thing here. There is plenty of time for that. I will, however, beg everyone to stop leading every story with the budget for the movie. Do you know how much all of your favorite movies cost? No… except for a handful of you. Try to focus on the movie… there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealing’s done.
Finally… this movie is very funny. Lots of laughs. But it is not a comedy. Holy moley, it is not a comedy. I am writing this because there are rumors about how the studio will position the movie. If WB panders to the fucking Faux Gold Tinpot Globes and puts this movie in “Comedy/Musical,” it will be a tragedy. Remember The Martian.
If you need to put Sinners in as a Musical, that would make more sense… but that film is a drama too. But don’t pander to an award that only means something if you keep insisting it means something. It’s beneath this film.
Until tomorrow…
Thank you for this candid take on the film.