One Battle After Another

We’ve all heard public lamentations for Hollywood to return to some glorified past where movies weren’t political. Paul Thomas Anderson, one of America’s most unassailable auteur filmmakers, ignores these anti-art lamentations in “One Battle After Another,” the most political film of the famed director’s career. It’s also hyper-tuned to our current moment. 

Inspired by elusive novelist Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” Anderson follows radical leftists in an autocratic United States that looks a lot like our own. The novel is set during Reagan’s rule, but the film transports the “revolutionaries” to the present. Their recourse for political action looks past picket signs and voting booths and toward non-murderous property destruction that disrupts banks, politicians and other systems at the axis of power. The opening scene follows the French 75 radical leftist group (essentially the Weather Underground) as they liberate more than 160 mostly Hispanic prisoners at an immigration detention center. It doesn’t get more timely than this. 

Years later, bomb expert Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa Ferguson (Chase Infiniti) live off the radar in the fictional sanctuary city Baktan Cross, where they help escort asylum seekers and migrants across the southern border and find a new life. A group of white Christian nationalists—cosplaying as the Ku Klux Klan but in Lacoste and Patagonia gear—call themselves the Christmas Adventurers Club and begin terrorizing the Fergusons because Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a hyper-masculine man, suspects Willa might be his own daughter. An unfortunate lapse in his relational history, especially considering his wish to join the Christmas Adventurers Club.

The leftist world of the French 75 isn’t one that name-drops theorists or over-philosophizes. Instead, they are deeply immersed in popular culture in a way not dissimilar from the flag from the Japanese anime “One Piece” becoming a global symbol of government resistance this summer.

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