One Battle After Another Is Satirical Subversive But Not A Great Film

Other than a rousing, raunchy performance by Sean Penn as a power-revved pervert, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another left me battle-fatigued, underwhelmed. It is a good film, clogged with an irresistible visual and verbal you-chew-my-line-I-chew-yours vitality. But beyond that, the pulverised plot falls short of the greatness that is being attributed to the film.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat Calhoun, a member of a defunct revolutionary group named French 75(?!) who wants to lead a quiet, peaceful life with his 17-year-old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). But the Establishment wouldn’t let him. That’s it. This is the plot. For all we care, Pat (with his multitudinous aliases, many borrowed from musical bands of the 1970s) could have been a bank robber trying to leave his violent past behind and rehabilitate with his daughter—in brief, a Schwarzenegger film with political overtones. The “revolutionary” thrusts in the plot are eyewash-level anti-Trumpisms, hurling abusive statements against American anti-migration laws.

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In Paul Thomas Anderson’s vainglorious vision, there is room for all colours and cultures, though the focus of the writer-director’s satirical romp is Mexico. There is a lengthy look at an undercover Mexican shelter run by a sufi-like martial arts teacher Sergio, played by the brilliant Benicio del Toro. The coverage of this episode, where acute danger is alchemized into cute game-playing, didn’t work for me. We can’t whittle down racist hunting to a joke and expect humour to wash away the toxicity. There is an ongoing joke about DiCaprio forgetting the password on the phone that accesses his special privileges as a former revolutionary.

Watching the tiring gag, I was reminded of the Malayalam film Eko, where a character describes how his Maoist parents were blown into smithereens. Death, particularly of the outlaw, is not funny. For this film and its terrific cast, it is. Amen to that. What caught my attention in One Battle After Another was how the action tumbles out in a ferocious fusion of farce and fear, with the funny lines finally overcoming the danger. It’s like watching a reality show where you know no one is going to be harmed—or at least hopefully not. Then there is Sean Penn, so twisted, so perverse, and yet not too sinister as an American army officer who is hoodwinked by a Black revolutionary woman and must have his revenge. The problem is, they wouldn’t let him. Not in a film as wildly subversive as this.