Review: “One Battle After Another”
There is a scene toward the end of One Battle after Another, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, that somehow manages to capture the whole. Three cars roar across a western landscape, driven by characters armed to the teeth. One is the daughter of a charismatic revolutionary. The second is a sinister white supremacist. The third is DiCaprio, addled by decades of drugs and alcohol, but determined to save his mixed-race daughter.
None of them are certain of the identity of the other drivers, but they scream like hellions in a speeding motorcade. The deserted highway undulates before them, rising and falling like an unspooling ribbon. Each strains to see the road ahead, especially Di Caprio who has been blinded in a gas attack. But all are dazzled by the hills, heat, and dust. It’s a perfect summary of everything that has come before: a bleak picture of American dis-ease and dislocation, deformed by eruptions of violent confrontation.
The scene ends with a set-piece of slaughter. The daughter brakes suddenly, forcing the crash of the supremacist, whom she executes with two shots to the chest. The last we see of him he is sprawled next to the car, a literal iteration of high-noon roadkill. This is an ugly update of a thousand Westerns, with a bad hombre gunslinger in a pool of blood.
Director Anderson is careful to vary the tone. The DiCaprio character has been out of the revolution so long that he cannot recall the code words and signals that would identify him to his handlers and yield information about his daughter. He threatens the officious “receptionist” at headquarters, who hilariously refuses to grant him access to the higher-ups. Only when he demands to speak with a supervisor does DiCaprio get the directions he needs. The higher-up in question is actually an old colleague, who queries him on the specifics of his own sexual preferences. Only then does DiCaprio pass the test. It is a perfect parody of customer service in which the corporation works impressively to defeat the customer.
But if sex is played for laughs in this scene, it stands next to violence as the great theme of the film. Anderson shows us an America where sex is engulfing. The revolutionaries grope each other as they train their pistols on the enemies. The supremacists organize to defeat their proposed victims, but their deepest obsessions spring from sexual longing, especially for the black and brown people they despise. Sean Penn, who plays the untethered Col. Lockjaw, yearns to be part of the supremacist cabal, but he must first execute the teenager he has fathered by a black woman. That means defeating the love he feels for both mother and daughter.
If there is redemption here, it is a vision of community that plays out next to the main action of the film. Former revolutionaries somehow find their freedom on the fringes of the world the rest of us inhabit. One group establishes a blasphemous nunnery, growing weed for sacramental use in the desert. A Latino owner of a martial arts studio leads undocumented mothers and their children to safety, also managing to protect his old colleague, DiCaprio. And the daughter who occupies the center of the film gives herself over to protest and demonstration, a peaceful version of her own mother’s career.
None of this may ultimately be enough. At the end of the film, DiCaprio is still smoking dope and living off the grid outside the system. The big changes he once thought about are no longer possible; One Battle after Another is too complicated for that. But Anderson assures us that there is still possibility in our deeds. They simply aren’t potent enough to bring the revolution.