One Wrong Move After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ill-timed and poorly made tale for a divided America

Paul Thomas Anderson may still be my favorite active filmmaker. His films have always had an originality and a unique aesthetic that I would liken to the work of Stanley Kubrick. Any time he announces a project, I tend to plan my year around it. But as information came out and the year has progressed, One Battle After Another started to be more of something to be concerned about rather than look forward to. News of delays and re-edits started to give red flags as to where this film would fit in. These past few months, the country has seen itself move further away from civil discussion and closer towards ideological terrorism/warfare. In the midst of a major political assassination and a tragic shooting that eerily resembles the opening scene, we have this movie: not art that grounds us and helps show us what really matters, but a film that more or less throws gasoline on the fire and may lead to imitators. Despite all its hype and premature accolades, One Battle After Another is without a doubt Paul Thomas Anderson’s sloppiest work, and is not concerned with any of the fundamentals that have made his work so world-renowned.

Anderson has always thrived with writing unique and three-dimensional characters: Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood, Barry Egan in Punch Drunk Love, Freddie Quell and Lancaster Dobbs in The Master, and Reynolds Woodcock in Phantom Thread scratch just the surface of his repertoire of amazing characters. One Battle After Another, however, doesn’t really have these: despite its nearly 3-hour runtime, every character feels wildly underdeveloped. We are not really shown the relationships that any of these characters have, and the few moments we have are found in extremely brief montages. The vast majority of any development is told to us rather than shown: we are “told” about characters’ relationships, but almost never “see” their relationship. As a result, there are practically no likable characters AT ALL in this film. This isn’t new to Anderson, but when every character feels like a caricature and has little to no redeeming qualities, it saps most, if not all, of the enjoyment factor.

Let’s start with the mother character, Perfidia, (Teyana Taylor) shown abundantly throughout the trailer footage, who is a terrible person. She masks her selfish nature and desire as being a “freedom fighter” by blowing up buildings, shooting innocent people, and living a highly promiscuous lifestyle. Whenever she is confronted with difficulty, she runs away. Whether it’s turning in her friends to save herself, abandoning her child to continue her impulsive behavior, or torturing others for perceived disrespect (yes, the character tortured is a sick individual, but torture is not permissible for anyone), writing a single letter over a lifetime to your abandoned child does not redeem this character. DiCaprio’s character has a single quality moment when he is begging Perfidia not to abandon her child to pursue her own selfish desires. This moment may have been the most important part of the film, but it is not dwelt on at all ever again. After this moment, he turns into a junkie who seems to emotionally abandon his daughter.

Teyana Taylor as Perfidia

When we come to the daughter, she was the only character I wanted to see more of, and we never get a lot of her either. Willa Ferguson (very well played by Chase Infiniti) is reduced to a mere plot device to be thrown around, abused, and emotionally traumatized in a rather cold and unkind film. The other key character is Sean Penn’s Col Lockjaw, who steals the show in every scene. While Lockjaw is bar none the best developed character (oddly enough, the only developed character), he is a sick and twisted individual who ends up being a comedic punching bag for the entire duration of the film. He simultaneously is terrifying and laughable, which I assume was the intent, and every time he appeared on screen, I was chuckling.

The other weakest factor from a craftsmanship perspective is the pacing and setting. The film ran like a teenager learning to drive a stick shift, erratically lunging between dead stop and 40 mph. The total lack of any intentional pacing made this feel unnecessarily long, and the lack of character development made it feel empty and too short. Anderson would jump from montages of terrorism and carnage to a meeting, then another meeting, then a car chase, then a conversation. There was a distinct lack of setting as well. Despite being reliant on location and time, the year of events and the locations remain elusive. It feels as if we blindly stumble through this story that seems to have a lot of shots in California, but we never get a clear picture.

My final craftsmanship-related critique is that the suspension of disbelief that is required for viewing this is on par with a fantasy film. Police cars conveniently not keeping up, zero security cameras anywhere, DiCaprio surviving a five story free fall with no broken anything, a single ICE agent being on guard at a facility, field DNA comparison kits working within 10 minutes, a bunch of random people having better tactical training than the military, bounty hunters randomly doing total 180-degree character swaps, a buffet of conveniences to allow the plot to continue, characters surviving a 12 gauge shot to the face, and the fact that the only two forms of government are Martial Law and Anarchy. These are just the tip of the iceberg of the fantastical and unrealistic tale.

There are some positives to the execution, with most of them being in the cinematography and the acting. Every performance was excellent, with no limit to the unhinged heights that they would reach. DiCaprio does give a great performance, and Sean Penn, for what may be the most unhinged he’s ever been (which is saying something): I would not doubt if he were able to pick up the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this. Chase Infiniti plays a demanding role with ease, even if she does not have the screen time required to properly do the character justice. The action is also incredibly well done, with the car chase being perhaps the best of the year. Anderson maintained excellent shot composition throughout that may lead me to rewatch these segments. The score by Greenwood was also enjoyable, being reminiscent of The Battle of Algiers.

Despite being obviously inspired by Algiers, the messaging was obviously lost in translation: while that 1966 film highlights that political violence is not okay and that those who ultimately pay the price are innocent people, OBAA seems to fixate only on romanticizing (literally and metaphorically) political violence. I will disagree with some that say it is Antifa propaganda on the grounds that OBAA is too sloppy to be considered propaganda. Propaganda typically requires likeable characters that you can really get behind to inspire you, but here, there is nothing. All of the characters are bad people in the best-case scenario, and at the worst, they are psychotically evil and narcissistic. Practically the only thing that makes Col. Lockjaw more evil than Perfidia is that he desires to potentially kill his own child rather than abandon her like she did. DiCaprio’s character makes bombs and becomes a loser stoner who emotionally abandons his child for a large portion of the film, and even at the end acts more akin to an awkward stepfather rather than a true paternal figure. Benicio Del Toro’s character is a human smuggler, which is its own can of worms that leads to widespread abuse and abduction. At the end of the film, every single “revolutionary” turns on their friends, going from noble martyr to lowly, selfish coward.

Despite all this negativity within the emotionally desolate saga, it does not do much to condemn what is happening. In Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, there is a crucial scene and a small scene on a subway that really drives the condemnation of the lifestyle portrayed in it home. Anecdotes are shared throughout the three hours of deviance, condemning it, all culminating in this quiet subway scene. It’s truly a beautiful thing to see pulled off, even if the film contains a lot of highly questionable content. One Battle After Another does not have this “subway” moment and features only a single scene that indirectly condemns what’s happening, which is never followed up on. There is hardly any follow-up or self-reflection featured within the 162-minute-long terrorism/child abuse montage, leading to One Battle After Another feeling closer to watching a well-shot and well-acted TikTok reel. With how the world is drifting, there needed to be a strong condemnation of senseless violence and hostile dialogue, but instead, we have bad people doing bad things to other bad people, with no hope for redemption, and a violent cycle doomed to repeat itself. Judging by the dialogue I’m seeing online, I would not be shocked if there are imitators that will be inspired by this film, who will not have the morals or common sense to choose peace over bloodshed.

One Battle After Another arrives in theaters at a wildly inappropriate time with indecisive (at best) messaging. With an increased amount of violence in political assassinations, shootings of schools, ICE facilities, churches, and public officials, this sort of film is the last thing a deeply wounded nation needs right now. Despite Anderson’s impeccable track record, even he has proven that no director is above the occasional dud, and this is a dud that could not have been more poorly timed in the grand scope of things. What this era needs to understand is that there is so much more outside of the world of politics to let it dictate our lives like this, and only through loving others around us and Christ can we hope to come through. I pray that these moments of tribulation may bring others closer to Christ or, at the minimum, some sort of belief outside the world of politics, which has consumed and continues to destroy the fabric of our society.