The America of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is built on crisscrossing underground networks: political rebels communicating in secret code, freedom fighters moving immigrants through tunnels and passageways, secret societies of billionaires whispering to one another in bunkers far below the earth. He shows us a country full of racists and revolutionaries, buffoons and prophets, the unscrupulous and the righteous, those attempting to dismantle power structures and those doing everything they can to keep things the way they are.
And like America, the movie itself is beautiful, strange, terrifying, absurd, profane, and spilling over with life and death and feeling. It’s quite something.
The end credits tell us the film was “inspired by” Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, which was about disenchanted hippies up against Reagan’s War on Drugs. Anderson took a couple plot points from the book and transplanted its druggy discontent and 1980s cultural divides to today, and he’s made it into something entirely his own. His screenplay is bursting with provocative ideas, some of which could fuel entire features on their own.
But One Battle After Another is also a pure chase picture, and a spectacularly good one. In fact, the political dissidents known as Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are the sorts who will probably never stop running. They’re members of a far-left revolutionary group known as the French 75, and they first lock eyes while liberating an immigration center on the Mexico border.
Soon they have a baby girl. Perfidia has grown disillusioned, and after a heist goes south, she’s caught, and she names names.
Flash forward 16 years. Pat, renamed Bob Ferguson (yes, Bob Ferguson), and his now-teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) have isolated themselves in the woods outside a California sanctuary city called Baktan Cross. They’re found by a heat-seeking missile in the form of Sean Penn’s vengeful Army colonel, whose name (Steven J. Lockjaw) suggests the zaniness of Catch-22 but whose every action screams evil.
Violence erupts in Baktan Cross, a casualty of Lockjaw’s single-minded, impotent rage. And so Bob and Willa are on the run again, although in different directions.
There are stretches of this movie so effortlessly assembled, so vibrating with tension and power, that they put to shame the flat, passionless state of so much contemporary filmmaking. Its opening 40 minutes unfold in a stunning montage that gave me the same rush as the first act of Anderson’s magnum opus Magnolia. There’s an extended sequence involving a police raid, a protest, secret apartments above a convenience store and a martial arts instructor played by a terrifically laconic Benicio Del Toro, and it’s breathless and funny while mirroring real unrest in real American streets. The climactic chase sequence on a perilously twisty desert highway is as gripping as any action scene I can recall, and like so much of the film, it follows a cruel comic logic.
This is a story told on a huge canvas and filled with a novel’s worth of supporting characters. But at its center is a father and his daughter: He’s still repenting for his mistakes, she’s figuring out who she really is, and they’re trying to put themselves back together as the world around them pulls itself apart. One Battle After Another is a live wire of a movie — exhilarating, bracing, challenging, invigorating — and the best film I’ve seen about America right now.
Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s “Movies 101” heard Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 here on KPBX.