The never-ending struggle

Movie Review
One Battle After Another
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
MTRCB Rating: R-16

PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON has taken Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland and turned it into an epic production about immigration raids, white supremacy, radical leftist groups, generational conflicts, a father’s love for his daughter and vice versa — the picture feels so overstuffed with high drama low farce and handheld ordnance you don’t feel much if any of the 166 minute running time.

I’ll call it: easily Anderson’s best most ambitious, most appealing work to date.

I’m also saying it out loud: I have not always been a fan of Anderson. His maximalist approach to filmmaking strikes me as often stylish but half-baked, with bravura passages of filmmaking in Boogie Nights and Magnolia marred by an underwritten second act: he tends to introduce half a dozen or more often interacting characters and with not much preparation or development has them climaxing literally and figuratively in their respective storylines. I think he improved hugely when his style slowed down, starting with Punch Drunk Love through The Master (thought the highly regarded There Will Be Blood was superbly wrought, but just couldn’t get past Daniel Day-Lewis’ unaccountable John Huston caricature). I suspect Licorice Pizza to be an important transitional film, where he returned to his maximalist period approach but took the time to actually prioritize character evolution over melodramatic outbursts.

Thought Inherent Vice another important transitional film, being the first time Anderson tackled Pynchon; in my book it was a dud — the casting was inspired, the filmmaking and production design amazing, but little of the book’s fun and humor came through.

Come One Battle After Another, and this time Anderson gets it right.

Side note: the film’s timeline is befuddling: the story starts in what may be 2009 or 2010, when ICE detention centers were beginning to operate (established by George W., expanded by Obama), fast-forward 16 years (that’s non-negotiable) to today (when Trump kicks the program into hyperdrive). Or the story starts today — and looking at all the detention centers with their hundreds of undocumented wrapped in foil blankets for warmth, hard to say it doesn’t — moves forward 16 years into the near (and all-too-recognizable) future. Not sure Anderson gives us any definitive details; not sure he’d offer a straight answer when asked a direct question. Have not read Pynchon’s novel but I assume much is made of the difference between time periods, of how displaced Pat (Zoyd Wheeler in the book) looks in present day (1984 in the book); Anderson makes the call (or mistake) of fudging the time period to the point where “now” is a vague eternal present, with the past unrolling endlessly to one side and the future standing ominously silent on the other.

Timeline aside the film is a wild ride, not unlike flooring the gas pedal of a 2013 cobalt-blue Shelby GT 500 on a stretch of desert road. We start with a raid on an ICE facility conducted by the French 75, with “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) firing off distracting pyrotechnics and his lover, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), infiltrating said facility and holding at gunpoint its commanding officer, one Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Perfidia taunts Lockjaw, who promptly stands at attention between his legs, earning Perfidia’s grudging admiration. When they met again and again behind “Ghetto” Pat’s back, Lockjaw is either arresting or being pegged by Perfidia, and you’re not sure who’s exploiting who. Upshot of which Perfidia ends up hugely pregnant (doesn’t slow her down none — at one point she’s firing a magazines’ worth on full automatic, her rifle braced solidly above her fully distended belly) and Lockjaw manages to locate and kill most of the members of the French 75, presumably on the basis of, uh, inside information.

Years later “Ghetto” Pat has become Bob Ferguson, living in what looks like a small mobile home hiding in a heavily forested area in the fictitious town of Baktan Cross, somewhere in Northern California. Bob smokes joints and pipes and swills Modelo beer in an attempt to pickle his brain and rinse it of his tumultuous past; his newborn Charlene, renamed Willa, is now a Junior in the local high school (hence the 16-year gap), attending karate classes taught by longtime sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro). Lockjaw is still Lockjaw, a colonel now, applying for membership in a highly placed secret society of white supremacists called The Christmas Adventurers Club (nice Pynchonesque touch there); he’s also trying to mop up what’s left of French 75 and along the way locate Willa, he is willing to mobilize his considerable ICE forces to get her.

Stalking and surveillance; skullduggery and betrayal; bits of mental jiu-jitsu where pursuer (Lockjaw) and prey (Bob and Willa and Sergio St. Carlos) play mental chess with each other (well not Bob — his brain’s thoroughly fried). I think it helps enormously that Anderson loves Pynchon, and Pynchon is one of the most playful, allusive, inventive writers around; Anderson felt he couldn’t do Vineland justice with a direct adaptation and this variation on a theme, switching out the War on Drugs for the War on Immigration (though Bob, to his credit, does his level best to keep drugs constantly in mind, specifically his), loses the untranslatable letter while successfully keeping the ineffable spirit.

And character, always character; Pynchon’s massive fictions end up building rounded characters which Anderson — especially in this picture — successfully translates to the big screen. It helps that so many talented performers are willing to sign up for his films: DiCaprio has recently made morally stunted buffoons his specialty and Bob is maybe his most fully realized yet — not just hilariously clueless but constant enough in his love for Willa that you can’t help but root for him to pull through anyway (it’s an uphill battle). Penn’s Lockjaw literally has a set mouth and stiff neck and hilariously awkward walk that makes you think Perfidia’s fist is still stuck up his… Lockjaw has never gotten over Peridia (hence the walk), he just covers the trauma of that encounter with the scar tissue of rationalization and self-delusion.

And that makes sense — of all of the characters in the film, only Lockjaw doesn’t grow or change, instead amassing power like an avaricious miser. You see a consistent theme amongst the right-wing characters: everything they’re doing, from ICE raids to secret Christmas-themed societies, is a holding action, an attempt to roll back change, prevent growth, keep society in a deathlike stasis. It’s a struggle that’s not only against human nature (hence the response of French 75 and the larger secret leftist organization) but against all of nature (see: evolution).

Del Toro’s St. Carlos is our fantasy of what the best, most unflappable opposition leaders must be like (“Ocean waves,” he says soothingly, in an attempt to calm Bob), and if he’s a bit too good to be true, at least Anderson leaves hints and suppositions as to why he’s so centered (hint: extended family, support of the community). But if he’s our fantasy (adorned with realist details), Chase Infiniti’s Willa is our hope, and I submit Anderson successfully sells her character: from lowkey rebel without a cause, she grows before our (and Bob’s) eyes into full-fledged revolutionary, training hard, taking risks, keeping a smart level head about her even when things get desperate (great little detail: when she’s racing down Highway 78 it registers to her eye — the way Anderson lets it register to ours, with camera mounted on front fender and the car’s nose dipping up and down the ocean-wave curves of the road in an alarmingly dizzying rate — that a car can’t see far ahead*, and the pursued’s one constant advantage is that he can throw things in his pursuer’s way). The future, Anderson seems to be telling us, may not necessarily be guaranteed to turn out fine, but it’s at least in as good hands as any.

Said it before, I’ll say it again: best film Anderson has come up with to date (thank you, Pynchon), but not necessarily the best of the year. I think there’s been better, and there might be more down the road.

*(A perfect visual image to summarize what this film is like — and what living one’s life is like, in the general scheme of things.)