If Warner Bros had a deliberate plan to soften expectations for the latest Paul Thomas Anderson epic – no festival premiere, worried leaks from test screenings – then that scheme looks to have worked brilliantly. One Battle After Another, a loose riff on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, arrives to arguably the best notices of Anderson’s career. Not bad when you have The Master and There Will Be Blood in your locker.
That hyperventilation is largely justified. Pitching Leonardo DiCaprio’s ageing revolutionary against Sean Penn’s reactionary despot, this hugely generous film, now set in the present day rather than Reagan’s United States, loses Pynchon’s poignant elegy for the 1960s’ betrayed ideals. No doubt many on the contemporary right will blub about Anderson having a whacked-out left-wing “terrorist” as his protagonist, but the film is tentative in its engagement with ideology: the establishment baddies are unequivocally appalling; the left-wing goodies have aged into harmless buffoons and disappointed stoners. Make of that what you will.
Where One Battle After Another excels, however, is in its unapologetic grandeur. Anderson is the favoured director of those who think great cinema must play on the largest scale (the Kubrick tendency). His taste for maximalism is, as often before, here demonstrated through the collision of lush images – like The Brutalist, shot on the antique VistaVision format – with clattering sound design and, from his long-term collaborator Jonny Greenwood, of Radiohead, a scratchy, honky score that presses home each character’s raging anxiety. It is there too in his direction of a perfectly chosen cast. The performances are not exactly broad, but there is a refreshing theatricality to every inflection. If only Laurence Olivier had been alive to enhance an Anderson joint.
We begin thrillingly as, a decade and a half ago, a far-left group called the French 75 stages an attack on an oppressive migrant camp near the southern border of the US. Here is an odd thing. Anderson has given most of his characters freakish Pynchonian names while sending DiCaprio’s dynamiter out as plain Bob Ferguson. Teyana Taylor plays his wife, Perfidia Beverly Hills. Shayna McHayle is the ruthless comrade Junglepussy. Penn, brilliantly allowing suppressed fury to escape in grunts and twitches, is the trench-faced Colonel Steven J Lockjaw. Go figure.
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That first half-hour is untouchable. Taylor is positively terrifying – and much missed when she vanishes – as mother to Bob’s ultimately adored daughter, Willa. The film stages its opening conflicts with an operatic virtuosity that argues for violence more as irresistible thrill than as political necessity. Nobody is better than Anderson at sweeping audiences along with poetic momentum.
Events calm down somewhat as we land in the present. Bob – a ringer, with his scuffed dressing gown, for “the Dude” Lebowski – now lives with Willa (the splendid Chase Infiniti, whose real name seems straight out of Pynchon) in some quiet corner of the west coast, where he watches Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers by way of afternoon relaxation.
That last reference feels like a conscious self-own. The Pontecorvo film is frighteningly confrontational in its depiction of political violence. For all the controversy One Battle After Another may yet generate, PTA’s film is closer to a blockbuster action flick than a radical provocation. Nothing wrong with that when the set pieces are so thrillingly staged. We here get two of the greatest car chases in recent cinema. Gun battles are ramped up to deafening levels. Lockjaw reappears with the ostentatious menace of a Die Hard villain.
[ Steve review: Cillian Murphy’s performance feels well-worked but unsatisfactoryOpens in new window ]
Yet Anderson and his fine cast layer all these pyrotechnics with a palpable sadness for their characters and for the country. There are few explicit arguments here about the state of the US, but one can imagine endless such arguments being projected upon it. Good luck with that, Paul.
In cinemas from Friday, September 26th
