‘One Battle After Another’ is a Blockbuster for the Current Times

For almost 30 years, fans and critics alike have longed for a union between Leonardo DiCaprio and Paul Thomas Anderson. The duo has finally decided to work together on “One Battle After Another,” Anderson’s largest scale film to date. 

With America’s signature 21st century auteur and movie star teaming up, it doesn’t get bigger than this. 

Arriving Sept. 26, “One Battle After Another” follows a group of revolutionaries fighting an oppressive government force, left to raise children and fend for themselves in a more dangerous world than they grew up in. 

The film is a return to Anderson’s 1999 present day ensemble film “Magnolia” while sharing the same psychedelic and comedic tone of his other Thomas Pynchon adaptation, “Inherent Vice.”

DiCaprio (“Titanic,” “The Departed”) leads the ensemble as Bob Ferguson, an aging man once radical but now left to the dust of time, silently reminiscing with the aid of his drugs. He’s both an undesirable loser and a sympathetic character, and DiCaprio holds both realities expertly.  

Other members of the ensemble include Teyana Taylor (“A Thousand and One,” “Straw”) as Bob’s fiery lover Perfidia Beverly Hills, newcomer Chase Infiniti as Perfidia and Bob’s daughter Willa and Benicio Del Toro (“The Usual Suspects,” “Sicario”) as a Mexican dojo owner Sensei Sergio.

Teaming up with Anderson again after playing a small part in Anderson’s 2021 film “Licorice Pizza,” Sean Penn (“The Game,” “Mystic River”) joins “One Battle After Another” as the power hungry yet hilarious Col. Steven Lockjaw.

Penn excels in translating Anderson’s perverted sensibilities in a comedic way, while representing the misguided and strange ways men acquire power and hold on to it.  

Visually, “One Battle After Another” is gorgeous. As the latest film to use VistaVision cameras, the detail of the image and haziness of the colors make it look unlike any other modern action blockbuster. 

Scoring the film is frequent Anderson collaborator Jonny Greenwood, whose work adds texture to the film’s emotional, unsettling narrative, oscillating between off-beat, almost goofy piano keys and swooning, operatic grandeur. 

Expertly plotted, the film is unpredictable while completely coherent despite its many plots. It succeeds both as an action-comedy and as a mature, intellectually rich piece of political filmmaking. 

The key to understanding the political message of the film is understanding Bob and Perfidia’s relationship to the story. The audience meets them as young revolutionaries, but quickly they must move on as they age out of wanting to make change. 

This leaves an even more frightening world for Willa to grow up in, surrounded by protests, immigration detention centers, violence and familiar modern images. Willa is thrust into these issues, and she fights. That’s what the film asks of the audience — to fight for what they see as right. 

“One Battle After Another” works with a variety of themes and ideas Anderson has explored across his previous films, such as male ego, found family, dysfunctional sexual relationships and the evils of capitalism. However, the movie is at its core a father-daughter movie. 

Bob and Willa’s relationship is imperfect and tested throughout the picture, but there’s a warmth between them that isn’t present in Anderson’s previous representations of father-child relationships.

In the latter moments of the film, their relationship nearly prompts tears with the earnestness of the actors’ performances and Anderson’s writing shining through. 

The other evolution of Anderson’s interest as a filmmaker can be seen in his inclusion of Black characters. While a few Black characters have been featured in past Anderson films, none have been as integral to the story as Perfidia and Willa. 

“One Battle After Another” is a stone-cold masterpiece — a rich, fulfilling, rollicking ride of a film, with relevant political messaging and genuine emotional depth. 

“One Battle After Another,” rated R, is in theaters now.