One Battle After Another Review - A Satirical Action Thriller About Survival in an Age of Control
After 2014’s Inherent Vice, Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the world of Thomas Pynchon with One Battle After Another, and the result is one of the year’s most exhilarating and troubling films. Adapted loosely from Pynchon’s Vineland, the film is both a grim comedy and a tragic family drama, a swirl of absurdist invention and sobering political allegory. It’s a reminder that Anderson is one of the rare filmmakers who can marry wild imagination with bruising emotional clarity, and do so with a sense of play that never undermines his seriousness.
The story follows Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), once a revolutionary firebrand whose specialty was explosives, now a weary single father trying to protect his teenage daughter Willa (played with astonishing confidence by newcomer Chase Infiniti). In his youth, Bob fought alongside the French 75, a revolutionary outfit that staged raids against government facilities and freed kidnapped immigrants. His great love was Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), fierce and restless, who seemed born to rebellion. They had a child together before being separated, leaving Bob to raise their daughter alone.
What Anderson and DiCaprio capture in Bob is a man half-broken by history, yet still carrying embers of defiance. DiCaprio spends much of the film in a bathrobe, puffing marijuana, a revolutionary lion reduced to domestic languor. But it is precisely this faded quality that makes Bob riveting. He’s no longer set ablaze by causes; he’s haunted by their failures. His fight has become quieter, more personal, focused on keeping Willa safe.
Willa herself is the emotional heart of the story. Chase Infiniti delivers a performance full of tenderness and teenage impatience: she loves her father fiercely, but she’s old enough to sense that his half-answers and evasions mask painful truths about her absent mother. When those truths finally surface, her relationship with Bob deepens in ways that ground the movie’s political whirlwind.
If Bob and Willa form the film’s center, Anderson surrounds them with a kaleidoscope of eccentricity right out of the Thomas Pynchon playbook. Sean Penn plays Colonel Lockjaw, an officer stripped of dignity in a raid that leaves him both ridiculous and terrifying. Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia radiates feral conviction, unable to stop running toward the next battle. Benicio del Toro appears as a martial arts sensei named Sergio St. Carlos, delivering cool so deadpan it’s comic. And in one of the film’s sharpest inventions, a secret white-supremacist society calling itself the Christmas Adventurers’ Club plots in the shadows, greeting one another with a “Hail, St. Nick!” The absurdity is intentional: Anderson reminds us that what once felt like ludicrous villainy has now become daily reality.
Thanks to the way Anderson blends Pynchon’s cerebral energy with his own visual bravura, what could have been shapeless becomes orchestral: Anderson knows how to keep every plate spinning without losing the beat of the human story. And what a story it is. Despite being based on a 35-year-old novel, One Battle After Another feels frighteningly contemporary. Its America is ruled in practice by shadowy cabals, policed by authoritarian might, sustained by white-supremacist fantasy. It is a land where violence is the default answer, and where moral purity becomes as dangerous as moral corruption. The Christmas Adventurers’ Club may be an absurd creation, but the queasy irony of the real-life bigots of today exercising their control far more openly than this shadowy cabal is what gives the comedy its sting.
Yet Anderson avoids didacticism. The revolutionaries are not unambiguously noble; their zeal curdles into dogmatism. In Anderson’s world, ideological purity is boring, even destructive. What interests him is the messy human reality: Bob the father, Perfidia the restless lover, Willa the daughter who must grow up amid battles she never chose.
The performances are uniformly strong, but DiCaprio may be delivering one of his finest. There is something deeply moving in the way he plays a man whose glory has faded but whose love for his child keeps him tethered to life. The comic touches – being dismissed as a “reefer addict” by uptight villains, slouching around in plaid – never undercut the gravity. He embodies what Anderson’s film insists upon: that beneath revolutions and ideologies are people trying, however clumsily, to love and protect one another.
Visually, the film is a marvel. Michael Bauman’s cinematography finds both grandeur and grit, while Andy Jurgensen’s editing maintains the movie’s peculiar rhythm, drifting from surreal comedy to sudden bursts of violence. Anderson has always had an eye for the absurd beauty of chaos, and here he stages sequences that balance the ludicrous with the terrifying.
The ending is particularly striking. After all the satire, all the explosions of violence and bursts of laughter, Anderson closes with as heartfelt of an ending as one could hope for. It’s a poignant, bittersweet grace note, Anderson’s way of saying that while the battles never cease, love offers us temporary refuge.
One Battle After Another is not just another Paul Thomas Anderson film. It’s a potent reminder of cinema’s power to confront us with the absurdity and cruelty of our world while still giving us characters to hold onto, while also making us laugh uneasily at things we ought to weep over. But it also makes space for tenderness – for a father supporting his daughter, for fleeting comfort amid chaos.
This is one of the year’s finest films, and perhaps Anderson’s most timely. He has crafted a work that feels both anarchic and precise, funny and devastating, chaotic and deeply humane. The battles it depicts may be endless, but its heart belongs to the fragile, enduring bond between a father and his child.