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PORTSIDE CULTURE
GO SEE ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER RIGHT NOW
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Eileen Jones
September 29, 2025
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_ Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another deserves all the
hype it’s getting. Run, don’t walk, to this thrilling, hilarious,
moving, and all too prescient portrait of American radicals on the run
from right-wing authoritarians. _
Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another. , (Warner Bros.
Pictures)
Glory be, I really liked and admired Paul Thomas Anderson’s _One
Battle After Another_. It’s enthralling, it’s hard-hitting, it’s
up-to-the-minute in its topicality, it’s drawing on and doing full
justice to a multitude of genres including action, comedy, suspense,
and the political thriller — plus it’s got a mesmerizing,
undulating, hill-and-valley climactic car-chase scene like nothing
I’ve seen before, and I’ve seen ten thousand car-chase scenes in
my time.
Overall, _One Battle After Another _is the complete package of
filmgoing delights. It’s everything movies made in the United States
should be right now.
And this film is brought to you by Paul Thomas Anderson, the
high-culture auteur responsible for such portentous works as _There
Will Be Blood_ and _The Master_. Here, he’s loosely adapted and
updated Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel _Vineland_, which is about
1960s radicals under fresh attack in the Ronald Reagan era, on the run
once again from federal forces in an ever more insane right-wing
environment.
_One Battle After Another_ arrives in theaters only a few weeks after
I was charmed by Darren Aronofsky’s _Caught Stealing_, another
example of a generally snooty director going for genre movie pleasures
and coming up with something rough-edged and delightful. If this is a
trend, it’s an unlikely and marvelous one, and I hope to see it
continue until zany, freewheeling Michael Haneke screwball comedies
are enchanting us all at the multiplex.
If there’s any justice — which is sometimes doubtful — _One
Battle After Another_ ought to win an Academy Award in nearly every
feature film category. Cinematographer Michael Bauman’s rich, raw
imagery, achieved by shooting in the old format VistaVision, like
Brady Corbet’s _The Brutalist_, is certain to be nominated. And
surely Leonardo DiCaprio must triumph as Best Actor, because he’s
simply outdone himself here. Who else could play the agonies of
single-parenting a rebellious teenage girl in grotesquely terrible
circumstances with more comically inspired self-pity?
DiCaprio plays “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun, an underground revolutionary
who loses his ferociously militant love Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana
Taylor) in traumatic circumstances when Captain Steven J. Lockjaw
(Sean Penn) leads the charge in destroying their far-left paramilitary
group, the French 75. In an edgy and absurd early encounter, Perfidia
sexually humiliates Lockjaw, mobilizing his twisted actions from that
point on. He develops a sexual obsession with Perfidia that provides
her the opportunity to escape imprisonment in exchange for ratting out
her comrades. Ultimately, she flees to Mexico.
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Sean Penn in One Battle After Another. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Fifteen years later, Pat and daughter Charlene — under the aliases
Bob and Willa Ferguson — are laying low in a remote Northern
Californian sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. Perpetually stoned among
the redwoods, Bob is both a paranoid burnout and doting dad, trying to
raise his spirited teenage daughter as safely and normally as
possible, in a state of ignorance about his past or her mother’s
fate.
Then their old foe, Lockjaw — now promoted to colonel and hoping to
join a white supremacist secret society called the Christmas
Adventurers Club — suddenly returns to the hunt for the few
surviving members of French 75. Bob and Willa are forced to go on the
run again, aided by Bob’s old comrade-in-arms Deandra (Regina Hall)
and Willa’s karate teacher Sensei Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del
Toro). He’s a leader of the undocumented Baktan Cross community,
conducting an updated underground railroad up from the Mexican border,
and his superb competence creates a wry contrast to his friend Bob’s
yammering hysteria.
It’s one long chase from then on, alternately harrowing and
hilarious, and sometimes both at once.
But don’t let the cartoonish character names and flailing comedy
fool you — this film is so startling in its political intensity, it
puts all other American pop culture to shame right now. It begins with
a French 75 raid on an immigrant detention center roughly fifteen
years ago (so that’s the start of Barack Obama’s presidency,
isn’t it?), which succeeds so spectacularly it quickly establishes
the link between youthful ecstatic thrills and revolutionary action
that tends to burn hot and flame out. Perfidia is so turned on by one
mission, she begs explosive expert Pat/Bob for sex right on the spot,
while he’s pleading with her to keep running and sputtering, “But
that bomb is set to go off in two minutes!”
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Chase Infiniti in One Battle After Another. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
A weighty sense of the Left’s past failures to impede the
ever-sicker rightward political march of this nation since the 1970s
is central to _One Battle After Another_. The scene in which a
drugged-out Bob is on the couch in his bathrobe watching _The Battle
of Algiers_ for what’s clearly the umpteenth time is absolutely
going to hurt. But it’s countered by the film’s anarchic energy
and insistent hope. Bob’s daughter and Sensei St Carlos’s student
Willa — who brings an impressive newcomer to the screen in Chase
Infiniti — represents the younger generation taking up the fight,
and she comes to share her teacher’s steady, matter-of-fact attitude
toward “one battle after another.”
St Carlos is the film’s model for trustworthy resolve and a smart,
unwavering approach to building contingency plans and a network of
reliable allies throughout various systems in order to continue the
fight regardless of inevitable raids, setbacks, and violent upheavals.
He combines unflappable staunchness with a lively enjoyment of human
absurdity that’s so endearingly acted, I feel I’ve never
appreciated del Toro enough, and I’ve been a fan since _The Usual
Suspects_ (1995). He and Penn will very likely be contending for Best
Supporting Actor honors in the upcoming awards season.
In short, _One Battle After Another_ is the film to see. See it a
couple of times. It’s got excellent traction with both critics and
the public right out of the gate, but it was an expensive $130 million
gamble, and it’s important that this movie succeed. It’s so
pointed in its critique of the power elite in this country, not just
as self-serving capitalists routinely screwing the citizenry but also
as aging monsters addled by long-held racist fixations that are all
tangled up with deep sexual psychosis. This isn’t a new portrayal of
course but it’s rare in American films aiming at popular acceptance.
And how often in recent years do we find a film clearly meant to be
inspirational for the Left? See it. Go now.
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Contributors
Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin, host of
the Filmsuck podcast, and author of Filmsuck, USA.
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