If the characters from Dr Strangelove somehow escaped and eventually found themselves in a Tarantino movie, it might look like One Battle After Another. A 1970s-vibing, magpie-thieving, funny and relentlessly entertaining ride, director Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is basically one gloriously extended chase with added spiritual input from Hitchcock, the Coens and Paul Greengrass (plus QT).
It’s funnier than your average Anderson movie – There Will Be Blood wasn’t notably full of jokes – and happier than usual to paddle in genre waters. The story is based on Pynchon’s novel Vineland, with much diluting by Anderson, and follows a gang of direct action radicals, the French 75, whose campaign of bombing banks and migrant detention centres is disrupted by a Terminator-like law enforcer determined to eliminate the activists.
Years pass. The gang has been broken up. Pat is now called Bob and has been in hiding in a sanctuary city so long that the daughter he had with fellow gang member Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) is all grown up. Perfidia squealed to the cops and is in witness protection or possibly dead. But the enforcer, in the shape of Col Steven J Lockjaw, has never given up. He’s still on the scent of Pat/Bob, and Perfidia, whose black body he found irresistible. Maybe Pat/Bob’s daughter Willa is really Lockjaw’s, it isn’t certain. It’s not a suspicion Lockjaw is going to mention to the white supremacist group trying to recruit him as a reward for his decades-long crusade against migrants.
It’s a cat and mouse tale, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the mouse – Pat/Bob – a radical gone to seed on the run with daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). Sean Penn plays Lockjaw, ramrod straight and with a deranged look in his eye, like the bastard child of Kubrick’s mental general Buck Turgidson.
Many of the names are Strangelovian – from Lockjaw and Perfidia to Bert Rimhorn and a religious order called the Sisters of the Beaver. The acting is big and cartoonish – DiCaprio’s ragged stoner Bob on the run in his dressing gown, Penn’s Lockjaw so wound up he’s in danger of exploding (both of them very funny), the white supremacists a gang of pathetic old men with a laughably narrow world view.
Chase Infiniti plays it cool as Willa, and alongside Regina Hall’s Deandra – a French 75 member brought back into play by the arrival of Lockjaw – the two of them give the film a baseline. Willa and Deandra are normal. No one else in this movie really is.
If the flakiness of many of the characters feel very Coens or Tarantino, so does the attention to technical stuff behind the camera. Shot on film on superwide, supersharp VistaVision cameras belonging to Giovanni Ribisi (who restored them – a man needs a hobby), the IMAX-before-IMAX format is suddenly back in vogue after decades of not being used at all. Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia both also used it. Alejandro González Iñárritu is currently shooting a film in VistaVision, so is Greta Gerwig. Here it’s Michael Bauman, who also did Licorice Pizza with Anderson, wrestling with the cameras’ immense technical complexity and coming up trumps. What a gorgeous-looking film this is.
Jonny Greenwood’s score chases film noir, Kubrick, the paranoid 1970s political thriller, Mellotrons, one minute quietly supportive, at other times intrusive. Now and again Greenwood gives thefilm a silent movie quality – demented jangling piano, elbows-akimbo popcorn music for a popcorn movie.
Anderson films are usually more po-faced than this. Maybe he just fancied a break from all the seriousness and a rest from his usual homaging to Robert Altman. Though there is serious stuff in here, make no mistake, and as well as obvious references to the current political situation Anderson implicitly asks a question about political radicals. Half-stoned and often half-cocked they might have been, but they existed. Where are the Pat/Bobs of today?
One Battle After Another – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
