Tripwire Reviews Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another

Directed By: Paul Thomas Anderson
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, Wood Harris, Alana Haim.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest effort had already created a buzz while drawing significant praise from the cognoscenti long before its general release, which is certainly paramount considering that this has been his most expensive movie by far. There’s ambition in there, but (drawing as it does from several sources) it veers wildly in tone, starting off as a verite docudrama spliced with pop video sensibilities about a group of “revolutionaries” similar to the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s, before morphing into a Coen Brothers flick halfway through.

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, an explosives expert working with a gang of far left militants known as French 75. He spends his days with his colleagues and partner Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) jauntily attacking politician’s offices, robbing banks, and doing what they can to destabilise the infrastructure, all decked out (as you’d expect) in retro-guerrilla chic while behaving like they’re all on a catwalk or at the Grammys.

In one operation, the outlaws free detained immigrants from a detention centre in California – Perfidia humiliates and belittles the facility’s excessively gnarly commanding officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who despite, or rather because of, the experience proceeds to develop an obsession with her, leading them to have a brief assignation.

Perfidia gives birth to a girl, Charlene, but isn’t interested in motherhood and subsequently abandons her and Pat. When she ends up getting caught after an abortive bank robbery, Lockjaw manages to persuade her into turning states evidence in order to avoid incarceration. This leads to him tracking down and killing most of her former comrades, with Pat and Charlene going into hiding as Bob and Willa Ferguson. Perfidia escapes from jail and the action jumps forward sixteen years.

Anderson’s work in the first half of the movie doesn’t seem to have the courage of its convictions, at least compared to earlier entries in his canon. The escapades of the French 75 offer little insight, with the film fetishising their antics – there’s no attempt made here to satirise, undercut or even contextualise their narcissism or pretensions, which effectively means that the project could never have the substance of the director’s previous efforts, such as No Country for Old Men.

So any extemporising is gradually trumped by bizarre and at times broad humour, caricatured cameos, secret bonkers cabals and slapstick (if extreme) violence, all ironically reminiscent of Anderson’s chief indie rivals, the Coens – which means that the second half is basically a skewed caper flick, albeit an amusing one. DiCaprio puts in a decent, scenery-chewing turn as the flaky, burnt out desperado (despite it being really over-familiar territory for him), but it’s Penn’s jagged performance as the comically grotesque colonel that steals the show. Well, that sort of role is his forte.

The direction and dialogue manage to engage the attention for the film’s 160-minute length – I assume the film’s overlong running time was due to its need to flesh out the characters, but you don’t really care about any of them that much, as 1) they’re all, with the exception of Benicio Del Toro, so off-kilter, 2) the action does jump around a lot, 3) the film does lose a wee bit of momentum from the flash forward and 4) the magic realism involved does work against the themes of the piece – what underpins the production is a sense of throwing everything against the wall and hoping it sticks.

All in all, it’ll continue to garner rave reviews, not because it’s a great film (it isn’t, although it’s not bad either), but because it’s as good as cinema gets these days. Nevertheless, entertaining, fun and worth seeing once.

One Battle After Another is in cinemas in the UK and US now.