‘One Battle After Another’ trailer
The trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s action thriller “One Battle After Another” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor. Released by Warner Bros. Pictures.
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Timing, they say, is everything, and it is not director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fault that his latest film, “One Battle After Another,” is opening after the worst two weeks of American left-wing political violence in decades. But it sure makes it hard to watch.
Imagine a movie about World War II in which you are meant to be cheering for lovable Nazis.
The film is an adaptation of the 1990s novel “Vineland,” and it turns out making Thomas Pynchon novels into movies is a bit like translating James Joyce’s “Ulysses” into Chinese. You can do it, but you miss a lot.
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What is missing here is even the slightest bit of nuance about the glorious necessity to kill people, including innocents, in order to topple Anderson’s weird and paranoid version of the American government.
At the top, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, or Rocketman character, is in a star-crossed love affair with Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. When they aren’t blowing up immigration detention facilities—yes, you read that right—they find time to create a daughter.
Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
Things go south when Perfidia murders an unarmed guard in cold blood during a bank heist while her partner yells about Black Power. The killing disrupts their little family and sends Bob and daughter Willa into hiding as Perfidia runs off, presumably to Cuba.
The rest of the movie is spent with Sean Penn’s racist and sexually strange Army Col. Steven Lockjaw, who is auditioning for a secretive and elite white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers. They presumably have massive political power and spend their time chasing the father and daughter.
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It’s not clear who this racist group is; it’s not even clear if the United States still exists. All we really know is that, aside from DiCaprio, pretty much all the white men in the movie are super-duper villains.
Lockjaw and his band of racists are just pure evil. There is nothing redeeming about them, and they clearly represent the American government or some version of it, because nobody ever stops Lockjaw from doing wildly illegal things.
Probably the strangest choice Anderson makes is to shift the time period of the story. In the original, the protagonists are 1960s radicals and the action takes place in 1984. That tracked. This does not.
“One Battle” starts with a mass political violence campaign from Perfidia’s group, called French 75, in about 2010, with the rest of the movie taking place in the present day. The idea that the federal government was engaged in racist fascism in Obama’s first term just feels absurd.
For this movie to make any sense at all, one has to believe the United States, today, right now, is a fascist dictatorship. That is not only a dangerous fallacy but, as we have found out recently, a deadly one.
Teyana Taylor as Perfidia and Sean Penn as Col. Steven J. Lockjaw in “One Battle After Another.” A Warner Bros. Pictures Release. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)
It is also dangerous to celebrate murderers. Another eerie coincidence is that the film was released the same week exiled far-left cop killer Assata Shakur died in Cuba. The Chicago Teachers Union took to X to honor “the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter.” So the people who teach our kids, just like Anderson, it would seem, think killing cops is fine, as long as it is for the left.
Growing up in Philadelphia, the name Mumia Abu-Jamal, who sits on death row for killing a cop in the 1980s, was famous—as it is around the global left, where he is celebrated as some kind of hero.
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But in the little Irish bars from Northeast Philly to the Italian Market, you will often see an old, dim photo of a man in a police hat and light blues. His name was Officer Daniel Faulkner, the man Abu-Jamal killed, a man who never became famous outside of our hearts.
As I walked to my car after the nearly three-hour indictment of America, I lit a cigarette and wondered how all these multimillionaires like DiCaprio and Anderson can live with themselves if they truly believe America is as rank and horrible as the film depicts.
How can all those actors at the Emmy Awards who yell “F— ICE!” like ignorant toddlers reconcile that the same government is what protects their fabulous lifestyles of the rich and famous?
Anderson won’t be committing any “brave” acts of murder to right the supposed wrongs of our nation. He’ll just make movies encouraging others to do so while he basks in the fruits of capitalism.
The whole movie made me a little angry, but then I remembered that the Trump administration is cracking down on Antifa—today’s very real domestic terrorists—and maybe this will be a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail.
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