One of the great creative bromances has flowered again: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. Having adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2015, Anderson has now taken a freer rein with his 1990 novel Vineland, creating a bizarre action thriller driven by pulpy comic-book energy and transformed political indignation, keeping his pedal at all times welded to the metal.
It’s a riff on the now recognisable Anderson-Pynchonian idea of counterculture and counter-revolution, absorbing the paranoid style of American politics into a screwball farcical resistance, with a jolting, jangling, nerve-shredding score by Jonny Greenwood. It’s partly a freaky-Freudian diagnosis of father-daughter dysfunction – juxtaposed with the separation of migrant children and parents at the US-Mexico border – and a very serious, relevant response to the US’s secretive ruling class and its insidiously normalised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) roundups: the toxic new Vichyite Trump enthusiasm.
Pynchon imagined the subversiveness of the 60s having its contested sequel in the Reaganite 80s; Anderson brings the time gap between these eras into the present day, although there isn’t the a cultural distinction between what are evidently the last days of Obama and contemporary Trump pomp. Specific references such as Maga and BLM aren’t mentioned.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, a dishevelled revolutionary, who is to become even more dishevelled in the future when he will do a great deal of panicky running through the streets in his dressing gown, whining that he has nowhere to charge his phone. Bob is part of a heavily armed activist cell that attacks migrant holding prisons on the Mexican border; Bob’s (humble) job is to set off fireworks as a diversionary-slash-celebratory tactic, and he is less important than his comrades, such as badass Deandra (Regina Hall) and cerebral Howard (played in cameo by composer and Yale academic Paul Grimstad).
Bob is passionately devoted to his partner and charismatic comrade, interestingly named Perfidia (Teyana Taylor). And Bob is not the only one. When the group attack the military compound, Perfidia captures and humiliates the aggressively reactionary Col Steven Lockjaw – played by Sean Penn with all manner of lizardly head-jerking, chin-jutting geezer mannerisms – who clearly derives sexual excitement from the whole business, and his creepy, cartoony unwholesomeness is another driving force. With the cold calculation of a born leader, Perfidia sees how she can toy with Lockjaw’s infatuation, using him to control and divert military opposition. Does she take it too far? Does the idea of taking things too far in fact have any meaning in this context? Perfidia deafeningly firing an assault rifle while in the ninth month of her pregnancy is one of the film’s most amazing images.
It is poor, befuddled Bob’s destiny to bring up a daughter he thinks is his, as a single dad. Sixteen-year-old Willa (Chase Infiniti) is as smart and focused as her mom, instructed in martial arts by her sensei (Benicio del Toro), while Bob gets more messed up on drugs and booze all day, watching Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers on TV, grumpily refusing to remember her friends’ preferred pronouns. But the forces of darkness encircle them once more, and when his old revolutionary friends re-emerge to contact him, Bob realises his brain is too fried to remember the all-important code words on the phone. As for Willa, she is now stuck with troubled thoughts about her mother and a mortifying question concerning Bob and Lockjaw, like the heroine of Mamma Mia! The Movie.
One Battle After Another is at once serious and unserious, exciting and baffling, a tonal fusion sending that crazy fizz across the VistaVision screen – an acquired taste, yes, but addictive. The title itself hints at an unending culture war presented as a crazily extreme action movie with superbly managed car chases and a final, dreamlike and hypnotic succession of three cars through the undulating hills. And is the central paternity crisis triangle an image for an ownership dispute around the American melting-pot dream?
Maybe. These ideas are very unfashionable in the US right now, which only makes this film more interesting: it is about dissent and discontent, and the lonely heroism of not fitting in.
One Battle After Another is out on 25 September in Australia, and on 26 September in the UK and US
