As apt as it feels to see a movie now about gestapolike forces patrolling the border, chasing down immigrants and dragging them to detention centers, “One Battle After Another,” the new Paul Thomas Anderson project, is based on the 1990 novel “Vineland” by Thomas Pynchon.
Anderson, best known for witty cynicisms poking at the grandiloquence of America – see “Magnolia” (1999) and “There will be Blood” (2007) – has wrapped his hands around the hard-to-grasp Pynchon before with “Inherent Vice” (2014). Here he proves to have a stronger grip, much of that coming in the reflection of current immigration policies and the political and racial divides that confront the country.
The deftly architected script begins in the 1980s with the French 75, a radical social justice terrorist group akin to the Weather Underground or Black Panthers who act under an “any means possible” mantra to spring detainees from detention camps by employing crafty military tactics – being well armed and brazen doesn’t hurt either. In our inaugural incursion led by Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, “Straw”), the 75 sweep into a border encampment, free the detainees and flip the playbook on the guards by putting them in pens, including Sean Penn’s commanding officer character, colonel Lockjaw.
Before he is imprisoned, he is told by Perfidia to make his soldier salute. Talk about performing under pressure: Lockjaw flies at full mast as Perfidia escorts him under gun to a holding pen. Lockjaw has a closeted hankering for Black women and for Perfidia – an agent of chaos even to those close to her. Making the scene stranger is that Perfidia is betrothed to another member of the outfit: Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio), a burned-out goofball, the least lethal looking of the lot but skilled with fireworks and other things that go boom.
What ensues is a convoluted and twisted love triangle – think “Competitors” (2024) with more gravitas – with Perfidia caught in a legal snare and Lockjaw looking to exact revenge. The result is a quick whittling down of the 75 that forces Bob and his daughter, Willa, to go underground. Leap forward 16 years and Willa (Chase Infiniti), on her way to a school dance, is pulled aside by one of the surviving 75 (Regina Hall, soulful and solid) because Lockjaw and his troops have targeted the town and is most interested in any kid begotten from a biracial union.
The siege is a long and arduous, with sudden, violent disruptions to family lives. What unfurls feels uncomfortably akin to some of the abductions we’ve seen on the street, from homes and in schools. The raid in the movie begins at the school auditorium where Willa is supposed to be.
Part of Lockjaw’s impetus for his cranked-up campaign is that he wants admittance to an elite, white supremacist shadow government organization known cheekily as the Christmas Adventurers Club (“Hail, St. Nick!”). It’s managed from the side by a square-jawed, blue-eyed Ivy Leaguer by the name of Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn). One key requirement is white cleanliness: Any evidence of a union with a POC and you’re out. No one uses demeaning slurs, but their talk-arounds and actions are far graver and disturbing.
“One Battle After Another” features some legitimately well crafted car chases, including a rush-hour crash-bang through downtown Sacramento and a dune-cresting pursuit through the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park with masculine engine-purring that would please the sensibilities of Willam Friedkin, who wrote the car chase playbook with “The French Connection” (1971).
The casting is inspired dynamite. DiCaprio dials in on this hapless, comedic flip side to his coke-snorting, penny stock baron in “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013), and Penn conjures up a sad, dutiful version of his inflated jarhead from “Casualties of War” (1989), if slightly mellowed and some 35 years older. Taylor and Infiniti bring the fire – especially Taylor, whose work here is bound to make her cinematic stock soar. Then there’s Benicio Del Toro as Willa’s sensei and the operator of an immigrant safe haven in a sanctuary city targeted by Lockjaw. A surgical yet comical evacuation scene of asylum seekers and subsequent encounter with the police draw on both the actor’s past portrayals of lethal coolness (“Sicario”) and subtle comedy (“The French Dispatch”).
“One Battle After Another” presses up against gonzo like “Inherent Vice” and, to a lesser degree, “Magnolia.” It flirts with going over the edge but never loses you. Any foible or inconsistency – there are a few Lockjaw scenes that feel a bit stilted or too long for their own good – is smoothed over quickly by the next stakes-raising scene. At close to three hours, “Battle” never feels long, nor does it snag.
The film’s grandly shot by up-and-comer Michael Bauman, who worked with Anderson on “Licorice Pizza” (2021). The desert sequence with its crystalline, azure sky, roadside mirage blurriness and wind-carved canyons is scrumptious to behold, especially in Imax. Borrowing a page from Quentin Tarantino, “One Battle After Another” was shot in a wide-screen format unused since the ’70s that can be screened as such in only a handful of movie houses across the country. One happens to be the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline; on this side of the river, you can get the Imax only at Assembly Row.
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