Heroes come in all shapes and sizes – from the sight of John McClane fighting bad guys in a vest, to the muscles on John Rambo’s back rippling up a storm as he tightened his trademark headband – but surely the outfit de jour for today’s protagonist needs a radical update for the trials and tribulations of the modern age. What your hero need is a dressing gown.
Paul Thomas Anderson has been making leftfield masterpieces for some time now that usually feature rather unlikely objects becoming rather iconic. From Dirk Diggler’s devistating dick in Boogie Nights to a shower of frogs in Magnolia, he even had Daniel Day Lewis raging on about milkshakes in There Will Be Blood – but somehow the sight of Leonardo Dicaprio desperately trying to right wrongs while staggering around in a dressing gown surely needs to be recognised by history as a seminal moment in Hollywood thrillers. Luckily, the rest of One Battle After Another is just as fucking amazing too…
Two members of the far-left revolutionary group known as the French 75 hook up after a particularly successful raid freeing immigrants from a Californian detention centre which, in turn, sets in motion a chain of events that ultimately reaches a head around sixteen years later. Quite what the intimidating Perfidia Beverly Hills sees in the somewhat awkward bomb guy, “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, I guess we’ll never know, but not long after their union, Perfidia falls pregnant, but after giving birth, leaves maintaining that the cause is too important. However, not only has she left Pat stuck with a baby, but ever since she humiliated the ridiculously uptight Stephen Lockjaw, the commanding officer of that immigration centre, he’s been sexually obsessed with her and is hoping to bring her in for reasons other than upholding his values and ideals. But soon the law catches up to Perfidia who, despite her apparent dedication to the cause, can’t do a 40 year stretch and starts singing like a canary for witness protection which puts everyone, including Pat and her daughter Charlene, in mortal danger. Adopting the name Bob Ferguson and renaming his daughter Willa, the man and the baby infant go into hiding and eventually end up in the sanctuary village of Baktan Cross where they stay undiscovered for sixteen tense years.
However, when Stephen Lockjaw is considered to join the secret white supremacist group, the Christmas Adventurers Club, he figures he needs to scrub clean every trace of his past and that mean eradicating Perfidia’s child, Willa, who now is a precocious teen who rankles under her overprotective father. But when Lockjaw descends upon Baktan Cross with the full force of the military in his control under the guise of a large drugs raid, every single immigrant that’s hiding out becomes a target.
The only thing seemingly standing between Lockjaw and Willa is “Bob”, but in the years since, Bob’s become pretty burned out thanks to a rather rigorous booze and drug intake that’s left him rustier than the truck from Duel. Can he rise out of his drug haze and manage to get his daughter out of a town under seige? Fuck that, how about can his frazzled brain actually remember 16 years worth of French 75 pass codes? It’s not looking good…
I have to confess that I had dropped off the Paul Thomas Anderson train over the last few years, but with One Battle After Another, I suddenly find myself extraordinarily eager to catch up. For lack of a better description, Anderson has stepped up and may what seemingly looks like his approximation of a comedy/thriller that includes overblown villains, klutzy heroes and a bunch of eccentric side characters the the story insists on treating as absolutely normal – but of course, in Anderson’s hands, it turns out to be so much more as themes of immigration, terrorism, racism and the utter paralysing fear of being a parent build to genuinely make this one of the most powerful cinema experiences of the year.
The key here is that Anderson is so in touch with ever single counterintuitive move the script makes, what may sound like preachy poison on paper ultimately becomes something intensively gripping and unexpectedly moving. Take Leonardo Dicaprio’s lead character of Bob Ferguson; once a respected – if jittery – bomb maker for a revolutionary group, his whirlwind romance with Teyana Taylor’s almost cartoonishly ferocious Perfidia means that the child they have takes the spark of revolution clean out of him as the desire to be a parent overrides sticking it to the man. As a result, Bob lives a sheltered, paranoid existence as a drug addled burnout who amusingly struggles to get back in the groove when the shit belatedly hits the fan. Experiencing the complete opposite, Perfidia rejects motherhood utterly by choosing to put the people first and in doing so, causes out and out catastrophe to her fellow fighters for the cause, but the genes that galvanise her into being essentially being Grace Jones meets the Terminator with the sexual appetite of Catherine Tramell (even her eyelashes are intimidating), pass on to her equally strong daughter (an impressive Chase Infiniti), which proves to be an extra panic attack for her schlubby father.
It’s amazing that a film can push its characters into such extreme territory as Dicaprio flounders, shrieks and constantly crashes out under immense pressure while seeking help from Benicio Del Torro’s local, unflappable karate teacher slash immigrant protector, Sensei Sergio; in fact, the moment where he engages in a full on phone meltdown with the French 75 hotline because his fried brain can’t remember the correct codewords may be one of the funniest moments of the year hands down. However, if having your “hero” flounder around in a state of all consuming panic may be a bit out there, Sean Penn’s villainous Lockjaw is seemingly playing for all the crazy cards. An unbearably clenched man, desperate to amass the respect he feels he’s worth, the character unleashes utter chaos against a sanctuary town purely because he wants to cover his track to join a terrifyingly ludicrous secret society that’s seems to have directly tumbled out from a wormhole from The Purge universe. Watching Penn employ a truly impressive array of ticks and twitches to convey just how tight this deranged racist is wound is nigh on hypnotic and again, somehow all involved manages to stop such a grotesque being lurch into the realms of parody as all involved (including a group of drug manufacturering nuns) all feel like genuinely, flesh and blood humans despite their quirks.
That’s not to say that Paul Thomas Anderson doesn’t have a tight reign on the tension too. One Battle After Another may manage to be very, very funny often while it’s plying it’s terrifying politics (think the balancing act of David O’Russell meets the unhinged commentary of Ari Aster’s Eddington), but the director manages to deliver sequences that not only squeeze you like a disgruntled gorilla, but prove to be wonderfully innovative. For example, a car case on a mostly straight road masterfully employs the participants constantly losing sight of their pursuer/prey due to numerous sharp rises and dips in the road and it somehow manages the trick of being utterly nerve wracking and bewilderingly hypnotic.
A truly serious contender for best of the year, Paul Thomas Anderson proves that you can stick it to the man, make a change and protect your family from tyranny and you can do it all while dressed in your dressing gown.
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