It took about two weeks and over $100 million in global box-office earnings, but conservatives have finally found Paul Thomas Anderson’s celebrated film One Battle After Another and they are, unsurprisingly, not happy about it.
Based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film is, at its core, a movie about a father and daughter set within the framework of a political thriller. Without giving too much away (because it’s worth seeing), it centers around a washed-up revolutionary, Bob Ferguson (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), who has to rescue his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), from a diabolical military officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) seeking to gain entry into a secret white supremacist organization.
It’s got action, comedy, family drama, an awe-inspiring chase scene, multiple crazy-good needle drops, “a few small beers,” and, yes, meditations on political violence, its revolutionary possibilities, and consequences. Many conservative critics appear to have homed in on its depictions of the latter with the most myopic lens possible. Per Ben Shaprio, One Battle is an “apologia for radical left-wing terrorism.” National Review movie critic Armond White called it a “reckless ode to radical terrorism” and the “year’s most irresponsible movie.” Peter Gietl wrote in The Blaze that it is an “insidious piece of propaganda that speaks to the depravity of the left.”
That’s not to say Anderson doesn’t wear his politics on his sleeve. Benicio del Toro’s character (Sensei Sergio) runs an Underground Railroad-style network for undocumented immigrants. During a key riot sequence, it’s an undercover cop, posing as a protestor, who tosses the first Molotov cocktail. The club Penn’s character wants to join is comprised of elites who are unabashedly Christian white nationalist, and one of their meetings was partially filmed at the Sacramento, California, mansion where Ronald Reagan once lived.
In a Fox News opinion piece on the film, David Marcus grumbled that there’s “nothing redeeming” about Lockjaw and the members of this club, theorizing that the left-leaning Anderson crafted them to “clearly represent the American government or some version of it, because nobody ever stops Lockjaw from doing wildly illegal things.” (As if an agent of the American government, or even the government itself, has never done “wildly illegal things.”)
“Lockjaw is evil because he wants border security and has a Nazi haircut. Hollywood eschewed subtlety a long time ago,” Gietl wrote for The Blaze, ostensibly ignoring the possibility that Lockjaw might actually be evil because (spoiler alert!) his desire to become a member of this club drives him to track down and try to kill his biracial biological daughter (whom he literally calls a “mutt” at one point).
Despite the movie’s nearly three-hour runtime, many of the right-wing critiques seem primarily invested in the opening 45 minutes or so. This sequence centers on the triangle between Bob (a.k.a Pat), Perfidia Beverly Hills — a fervent revolutionary played by Teyana Taylor — and Lockjaw. The dynamic shifts and gets freaky amid a backdrop of political attacks carried about by the group Bob and Perfidia belong to, the French 75. They free migrants from an ICE-like detention center, blow up a senator’s office and the Los Angeles power grid, and rob a bank.
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Are these sequences cinematic and exciting? Yes. Might those who oppose the mass roundup of refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers get a thrill from watching a prison break at a detention center? Sure. Does that mean the film “promotes violence against ICE,“ as Shapiro proclaimed, or that Anderson “intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres … by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present,” as White inveighed? That doesn’t feel quite right for a sequence that ends in tragedy, hinging largely on Perfidia’s struggles with postpartum depression and her encounters with the limits of revolutionary political violence.
As has been noted in noted in various critiques, the French 75 does resemble some Sixties and Seventies radical groups like the Weather Underground. But the critiques on the right often raise the specter of antifa, which they continue to see as some hyper-organized, militant leftist cabal, instead of loosely connected groups dedicated to antifascism.
Gietl’s Blaze piece boasts the headline “Hollywood goes full antifa with One Battle After Another.” And Marcus ended his piece by saying his anger at the film was soothed when he remembered “that the Trump administration is cracking down on antifa — today’s very real domestic terrorists — and maybe this will be a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail.”
These readings feel far more like projection, though. As John Semley wrote in a critique from the left in The Nation, “One Battle After Another offers up a fantasy of revolutionary esprit de corps, where every ex-radical, migrant laborer, longhair, stoner, sympathetic social worker, and skateboarding punk is part of an expansive underground movement. It is a vision of a cohesive American revolutionary left that may only actually exist in the paranoid Republican mind.”
Of course, leave it to Shaprio — who famously had a meltdown over Barbie — to so widely miss the point of the film, while coming weirdly close. In his video review, he stated that “basic suggestion” of the film is that there’s “a conspiracy theory in which the United States is run by white supremacist Christian nationalists and all people of color and a few nice incompetent fellow travelers like Bob are going to take on that entire system. And that system must be taken on at the cost of family, at the cost of friendship, at the cost of decency, at the cost of basic human capacity for success.”
That is quite literally what One Battle After Another is about: trying to take on the system, and then dealing with the repercussions. And despite Shapiro’s insistence that nobody in the film ever even considers “being a productive citizen of society,” it is filled with characters who are just that, who look after one another and care for their communities as well as the strangers in their midst.
It feels especially wild to suggest One Battle is about stoking bloodlust or encouraging violence when, at the end of the day, it is a deeply sincere and optimistic film rooted in the possibility of community. “I think I what I’ve been noticing over the past two weeks since we’ve started showing the movie is, you know, maybe it’s not fashionable to make an optimistic movie right now,” Anderson told Rolling Stone. “That was a risk. It’s fashionable to be cranky or something. But there’s a streak of optimism in the film. I hope there is, at least, I because I feel that way. I mean, I have four kids. I’d better be fucking optimistic.
From Rolling Stone US
