Paul Thomas Anderson: Raised on promises

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Among the syndromes that make the current American moment so vexing is a liberal contingent duly alarmed but bereft and flummoxed in the face of unprecedentedly heedless and unrestrained illiberal forces. Concerned citizens – including elected officials – don’t know what to do, and they are clamoring for a sensibly energized way forward. Movies can reflect the zeitgeist quite resonantly and animate civic discourse. Lately, though, they have tended to divert to smaller-bore social issues and wistfulness for Americana or the counterculture without confronting what could happen to the country overall, Alex Garland’s Civil War excepted. Last week, however, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another landed. It is a fully sussed cri de coeur of liberal conscience, resistance, and resilience inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, and the first great political movie of the Trump era. Anderson, as he has often done, uncannily balances quirky satire, lacerating insight, and sheer heart, now in a film that seamlessly weaves together America’s recent past, its present, and its possible near future. Pending deliverance from the present danger, it may provide moral and psychic buoyancy.

Bob Ferguson – an exquisitely addled and dyspeptic Leonardo DiCaprio – is a burnt-out left-wing revolutionary, once known as Ghetto Pat Calhoun, from the French 75, a Weathermen-like outfit whose heyday of breaking migrants out of prisons, bombing anti-abortion politicians’ offices, and knocking over banks has long passed. He is rusticating in paranoid, weed-befogged seclusion in the southwestern sanctuary city of Baktan Cross with his beloved biracial daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, smoldering), whose mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, incendiary) fled in 2009, during the French 75’s inaugural guerrilla campaign. Willfully moving on, the present U.S. administration has gone full martial-fascist, now rounding up immigrants, placing them in crude concentration camps, and violently suppressing all pushback. Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw – Sean Penn in graphic-novel glory, dripping with “the warrior ethos” – distinguished himself with counter-insurgency heroics back in the day and has reprised them more recently with singular brutality at the border. In turn, an elite white supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club – a moniker, it’s worth reflecting, not much more inane than, say, the Proud Boys or the Department of War – has selected him for provisional membership.

Lockjaw and his sociopathically smarmy patrons – it’s unsettling that they don’t seem all that exaggerated – appear to be riding high. Because the group must confirm racial purity through vetting, though, the racist Lockjaw is compelled to destroy all evidence of a tryst that he coerced Willa’s Black mother, with whom he was sadomasochistically obsessed, into having with him in 2009, and which, it transpires, produced Willa. His lethal quest, with an anti-migrant crackdown as cover, triggers a distress signal from a rump, theretofore dormant French 75, enabling Ferguson to narrowly escape capture at his house and live to fight another day to save her. His contact in the field is Sergio St. Carlos – Benicio del Toro, with his patented heavy-lidded cool – who is also Willa’s martial-arts instructor and leader of an illegal immigrant community in Baktan Cross. By the time their positions are resolved in a ferocious chase on an undulating desert highway – obliquely reminiscent of Frank Bullitt’s pursuit of hitmen through the streets of San Francisco, and shot in a grainy, merciless gaze – Ferguson is back in the struggle and Willa is committed to it.

One Battle After Another is almost as much madcap gonzo as dystopianly dire, and it is frequently chortle-worthy. The French 75 includes exotically styled characters such as Junglepussy, Mae West, Talleyrand, and Gringo Coyote; Ferguson never relinquishes his ratty plaid bathrobe; and Lockjaw appears to have internal cattle-prod problems. Alongside the swagger, though, the urgency is clear. Against a nasty tableau all the more terrifying for its plausibility, Jonny Greenwood’s proggy soundtrack riffs insouciantly hip reassurance – bolstered especially by St. Carlos’ goofy imperturbability – that the necessary players will rise, and keep rising, to the occasion. Yet Anderson is anything but an uncharitable or didactic filmmaker. The America he envisions, and loves, is a large nation of oddballs and eccentrics, with room for misanthropic gamblers and grifters, communitarian porn stars, narcissists and neurotics of myriad stripes, and even predatory cult leaders and pitiless capitalists. But there are limits to who and what ought to be acceptable, and he delineates them here. For these reasons alone, Trump & Co. will not like the movie. There is another: One Battle After Another pulses with galvanic, fist-raising defiance. When the credits roll, and the twangy portent of Tom Petty’s lead-in to American Girl enshrines the ordeal and arrival of Willa, an indomitable woman of color, patriotic hope for a fallen nation soars.

One Battle After Another, directed and written by Paul Thomas Anderson. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 2025.

About the author: Jonathan Stevenson is a New York-based policy analyst, editor, and writer, contributing to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and Politico, among other publications, and a regular contributor to Two Coats of Paint.