ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER

Paul Thomas Anderson's Mastered Chaos

By Imanos Santos

Unsteady. Furious. Chaplinesque.

The bathrobe flutters in the California wind. Bob Ferguson is no hero. He reeks of alcohol, his poorly trimmed beard tells the story of years of neglect, and his paranoid gaze betrays a man who abandoned his ideals somewhere between the Mexican border and a broken-down couch. Yet he's the one Paul Thomas Anderson chose to carry his most ambitious, most expensive, most American film in all its ambivalence. With a budget exceeding $140 million, the director accomplishes what no one would have bet possible: transforming a Thomas Pynchon adaptation into a worldwide cinematic event.

Léonardo DiCaprio | Copyright Warner Bros.

Leonardo DiCaprio has never been so disheveled on screen. Thirty years after turning down Boogie Nights, the actor finally reunites with Anderson in a collaboration that feels like a belated inevitability. His Bob isn't the flamboyant revolutionary of the opening sequences, the one who liberates migrants and makes love to Perfidia in Beverly Hills between explosions. No, the one the film shows us is human wreckage, a single father who watches The Battle of Algiers in his underwear and launches into a frantic race not to save the world, but simply to find his daughter. DiCaprio embodies this transformation with an accuracy that reminds us why he remains one of Hollywood's last sacred monsters. Every wrinkle on his weary face tells of a dead utopia, every clumsy gesture evokes a body that has given up the fight.

Unsteady

The film moves like its main character: sideways, uncertain, but with an energy that commands admiration. Anderson refuses narrative comfort. One Battle After Another shifts registers at every turn, moving from absurd comedy to political thriller, from family drama to pyrotechnic spectacle. This instability could ruin any other project. Here, it becomes the very language of the film. Because how do you tell the story of Trump's America, its white supremacist drift, its fantasies of purity, without accepting that the narrative itself must waver?

The French 75 group—a name that smells of gunpowder and champagne—attacks a detention center at the Mexican border in an opening sequence that literally explodes on screen. Anderson films the action with an unusual mastery for him, to the point where some critics have evoked Speed, the Coen Brothers, even Tarantino. But that would be forgetting that the filmmaker has always known how to orchestrate chaos. His shots are never gratuitous. Every explosion, every car chase serves a purpose: to show how political violence always ends up devouring those who practice it.

Bob is unsteady because his world is. He raises Willa alone, this rebellious daughter embodied by the revelation Chase Infiniti, a kid who explodes on screen with a presence that even the casting veterans struggle to eclipse. Their relationship forms the beating heart of the film, a clumsy tenderness amid the carnage. Anderson knows that great political epics fail when they forget intimacy. Here, every action scene invariably returns to this simple question: can a father protect his child when the world is collapsing?

The direction balances between absolute control and apparent improvisation. Michael Bauman's VistaVision cameras capture California in orange tones reminiscent of twilight westerns. The natural settings breathe. You feel the dust, the heat, the physical exhaustion of hunted characters. This aesthetic is no commercial veneer. It anchors the film in tangible reality, even when the narrative flirts with the absurd. Because Anderson never wanted to make a clean blockbuster. He wanted a film that sweats, stinks, bleeds.

Furious

Anger runs through every shot. Not the demonstrative kind of manifestos shouted at the camera. No, a muffled rage, the kind that boils beneath the surface and ends up consuming everything. Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, played by a demented Sean Penn, embodies this fascistic America that drapes itself in uniform and flag. His obsession with Perfidia Beverly Hills—Teyana Taylor absolutely incandescent—says everything about the American pathology: this sick desire to possess what you claim to fight, this sexual fascination with the enemy you want to annihilate.

Penn delivers a performance worth dwelling on. His Lockjaw isn't the cartoonish villain one might fear. He's a man convinced of his mission, persuaded that his brutality serves a higher good. He kills methodically, humiliates precisely, and the film never allows him to tip into caricature. This subtlety makes the character infinitely more dangerous, more credible. We recognize in him real figures, generals who justify the unjustifiable, politicians who transform cruelty into doctrine.

The film's fury feeds on American current events with disturbing lucidity. Anderson sets his story in the 1990s, at the death throes of a revolutionary utopia, but everyone understands it's 2025 he's filming. The detention centers, white supremacists, private militias, generalized paranoia: everything that gnaws at contemporary America is compressed into this narrative that refuses easy solutions. Because unlike activist films that preach to the converted, One Battle After Another offers no hope of systemic change. The French 75 fail. Bob doesn't save the world. Colonel Lockjaw isn't defeated for good.

This absence of political catharsis is what makes the film authentically radical. Anderson no longer believes in great revolutions. He shows individuals struggling in a machine that crushes them. Benicio del Toro, as a weary veteran, embodies this disillusionment with impressive economy. Every line comes out of his mouth like a statement of failure. Yet the film never sinks into pure cynicism. There's a tenderness in Anderson for his characters that redeems their powerlessness. Bob is pathetic, but he's a father. This filiation, this transmission from one generation to another, becomes the only revolutionary act still possible.

Jonny Greenwood's music accompanies this fury with a sonic tapestry that never lets up. Greenwood and Anderson now form an inseparable duo, and the composer seems to instinctively understand what each scene needs. His notes dig into the action, reveal what's boiling beneath the surface. When Bob runs through the desert, the music exposes his panic.

Chaplinesque

The third qualifier may surprise. Yet it's the one that best defines Anderson's approach. Charlie Chaplin used farce to denounce the inhuman. He showed machines that devoured workers, dictators who danced with globes, and the audience laughed before understanding they'd just looked horror in the face. Paul Thomas Anderson proceeds in exactly the same way.

The film's most spectacular action scenes always contain a jarring comic element. Bob fleeing in his bathrobe, beer in hand, pursued by military helicopters—that's pure Chaplin transposed to the 21st century. The Tramp slipping on a banana peel becomes the ex-revolutionary stumbling over his own illusions. This slapstick comedy amid chaos in no way diminishes the seriousness of the subject. On the contrary, it makes it bearable.

Anderson films the breakdown with tenderness. His characters are magnificent losers, failures who keep moving forward because they have no other choice. Bob possesses none of the qualities of the traditional hero. He's cowardly, selfish, paranoid, alcoholic. But he loves his daughter. And it's this unsteady, clumsy, imperfect love that gives the film its profoundly humanistic dimension. The father-daughter-colonel triangle poses the question of the American dream, its transmission, its corruption.

The reference to Chaplin takes on its full meaning in how the film treats power. Lockjaw, with his medals and authority, should crush Bob. But the film constantly shows how institutional power loses its footing against desperate improvisation. The confrontation scenes between the two men are never epic duels. They're ridiculous scuffles, car chases gone wrong, plans that fail miserably. No one really controls the situation, and that's what's spectacular.

This Chaplinesque approach allows Anderson to avoid the pitfall of the thesis film. He doesn't lecture. He shows humans trying to survive their own contradictions. Perfidia, this magnificent and terrifying revolutionary, disappears from the narrative after giving birth to Willa. Her absence structures the entire film. She's the mythical figure, the ideal you can never catch up to. Bob searches for her, Lockjaw desires her, but she remains elusive. This feminine absence at the center of the narrative recalls classic films where women exist only as objects of masculine quest. Except here, Teyana Taylor imposes such a presence in her early scenes that her ghost truly haunts every subsequent shot.

The Warner Gamble

That a Hollywood studio would finance such a project at such a scale is either miraculous or reckless. Warner Bros. bet $140 million on a Paul Thomas Anderson film adapted from Thomas Pynchon. No one would have wagered a euro, or rather a cent, on that equation. Pynchon is notoriously unadaptable. Anderson has never made a blockbuster. And yet, the gamble seems to be paying off. The film achieved the best opening of the director's career, topping the American box office with over $22 million in its first weekend.

These numbers don't tell the whole story. They mainly confirm that the American audience is looking for something other than exhausted Marvel franchises. One Battle After Another arrives at a moment when Hollywood is rediscovering that an auteur film carried by major stars can still work commercially. Leonardo DiCaprio guaranteed a certain visibility, but it's the artistic proposition that seems to seduce. Audiences want to be shaken, surprised, disturbed.

Critics have massively followed suit. With 95% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes and praise already evoking the Oscars, the film stands as the cinematic event of this year's end. Steven Spielberg himself cited it among his favorite films. These consecrations aren't trivial. They signal that Hollywood recognizes something essential in this film, a form of cinema that refuses compromise while speaking to the masses.

The awards campaign has already begun. DiCaprio could win his second Oscar, ten years after The Revenant. Chase Infiniti could be the great revelation of the season. But the real stakes concern Paul Thomas Anderson himself. Eleven Oscar nominations, never a statuette. This glaring injustice could finally be remedied. Because if One Battle After Another deserves the highest distinctions, it's not for its spectacle or performances—however exceptional they may be—but for its ability to film contemporary America without looking away.

Transmission and Scars

What's most striking about this sprawling film is its capacity to remain viscerally intimate. The most excessive action scenes always return to the father-daughter relationship. Willa looks at Bob with a mixture of love and contempt. She knows who he was, what he believed in, and she sees what he's become. This adolescent lucidity cuts through the film like a cleaver. Anderson doesn't idealize filiation. He shows what we transmit despite ourselves: fears, traumas, failures.

Young Chase Infiniti is far from innocent. Her Willa has already understood everything. She expects nothing from her father, which makes every gesture of tenderness between them infinitely more precious. Their dialogue never falls into dime-store psychology. They speak little, but every word counts. This narrative economy is typical of Anderson. He trusts his actors, their silences, their looks. DiCaprio and Infiniti create an improbable alchemy, two solitudes that collide and end up taming each other.

The film ultimately poses a vertiginous question: what do we transmit to the next generation when we've failed to change the world? Bob has no wisdom to offer, no lesson to give. He just has his tired body, his paranoia, and a clumsy love. Yet that's what Willa retains. It's not the betrayed ideals or lost battles she keeps, but the stubborn presence of a father who refuses to give up. This impure, contradictory transmission is perhaps the only form of revolution still possible.

Scars cover all the characters. Physical, psychological, political. Perfidia's body bears the marks of her battles. Lockjaw's face deforms in rage. Bob drags his carcass like a reproach to the living. These wounds don't heal. The film offers no redemption, no final liberation. There will be other battles. Always. That's the entire meaning of the title. One battle after another, without end, without definitive victory, just the exhausting repetition of a conflict that has traversed American history since its origins.

Léonardo DiCaprio | Copyright Warner Bros.

Pynchon's Specter

Thomas Pynchon hovers over the film without ever smothering it. Anderson understood that adapting him didn't mean reproducing his labyrinthine prose on screen. He captured his spirit: paranoia, absurdity, conspiracies that lead nowhere, characters crushed by forces they don't understand. The novel Vineland already spoke of the death of protest movements, capitalist recuperation, the betrayal of ideals. Forty years after its publication, the diagnosis remains explosively current.

This fidelity to spirit rather than letter allows the film to breathe. The director doesn't feel obliged to explain every connection, to untangle every narrative thread. He accepts the gray areas, secondary characters who disappear without explanation, plot twists that lead to dead ends. This apparently anarchic construction reflects the very experience of living in contemporary America: permanent chaos where everyone tries to make sense of the senseless.

The film runs two hours and forty-two minutes. Some will find it long. Yet not a minute seems superfluous. Anderson takes his time because he's filming lives that slowly fall apart. You can't tell the story of a utopia's collapse in ninety calibrated minutes. You have to let time stretch, weigh, wear down the characters as it wears down the viewer. This duration becomes an integral part of the device. You leave the theater as exhausted as Bob, and that's exactly the desired effect.

One Battle After Another stands as a sincere and necessary work, because it films something essential: the difficulty of existing politically in a world that has given up transforming itself. Because it shows characters who refuse to give up despite the evidence of their defeat. Because it proves that a filmmaker can still film America without compromise while reaching a wide audience.

Paul Thomas Anderson has made his most accessible and most radical film. This apparent contradiction is his greatest achievement. He renounces nothing of his complexity, his formal demands, but he puts them in service of a story that speaks to everyone. The film is unsteady because the world is. It's furious because the situation demands it. It's Chaplinesque because laughter remains the only weapon of the defeated. It's a necessity.

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