Leonardo DiCaprio has always been the kind of actor where it’s easy for me to imagine his roles are all in the same canon and they’re all reincarnated characters. Like I can see his revolutionary agitator “Ghetto Pat” Calhoun in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another having weird dreams some nights about running from Billy Zane on a sinking cruise ship, or that he’s Howard Hughes filming an air movie or a con artist pulling the wool over Tom Hanks. This newest venture from writer/director Anderson is mostly a strong mix of action romp and dramatic character study, but its twist is how the main conflict quickly goes from ideological to deeply personal.
When he’s not freeing immigrants from prison and enraging his arch-nemesis Colonel Lockjaw, played manically obsessive by Sean Penn, Pat is pursuing a relationship with his girlfriend Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), who’s more interested in keeping up her anti-government ambitions than settling down to family life. After the two have a daughter together, Charlene (played by Chase Infiniti during her teenage years) and Perfidia is forced to go on the run, Pat and Charlene take the identities of “Bob” and “Willa” trying to make the most things in a refugee town.
But Lockjaw can’t let bygones be bygones, and on top of hoping to earn his way into a secret racist society (Tony Goldwyn is effectively chilling as their leader), he’s quite suspicious as to who Willa’s actual biological father is. He launches a small-scale military attack on Bob that’s more or less an excuse to kidnap the kid, sending the two freedom fighters into a cat-and-mouse game.
The three way dynamic between Bob, Willa and Lockjaw is the core of the story and the film’s strongest element, with the bond between the two heroes being pretty convincing and Penn playing an absolute nutcase (not that he isn’t used to that). So far as hyper-obsessed would-be parents go, Lockjaw isn’t quite as over the top as Quaritch from Avatar (oh, we’ll get to him), but he gets the job done as a hateable villain. Infiniti displays some good range for an early point in her career, and Benicio Del Toro is charming as the town leader who helps Bob and Willa out.
What I’m gonna say might sound weird, but it’s not meant as a slight on the story, just an observation: there’s a hint of paranoia in it. I don’t state that to discredit the themes or the characters’ objectives, they’re rebels seeking to take the power back, an easily relatable idea as any Star Wars fan knows, and Lockjaw is cartoonishly persistent.
I mean more so in how it’s directed and how well Anderson is in depicting their desperation. I’m kinda glad they don’t spend too much time going into long pontifications about their ideology (save for one scene where Bob dresses down a schoolteacher for celebrating slave owning historical figures), as the film is mainly a slow burn action piece.
I guess the one sticking point for me that holds the movie back is how I’d like to have seen a bit more world-building. As it’s loosely based off of an alt-history novel, budgeting considerations notwithstanding, they could have used more propaganda on behalf on the villains, something to sell even more visually the level of police state that the French 75 are up against- think the New Founding Fathers from the Purge series.
What’s here isn’t bad, it’s not enough to ruin the story- we do get some shots of a detention center, but it’s a bit hard to suspend our disbelief when the environments look so plain and the soldiers and cops look so ordinary. I’m not asking for Hunger Games-level stuff here, it’s just the kind of script that maybe would have benefited from a two-to three minute setup of One Battle’s world and detailing the exact scope of the Christmas gang’s influence.
Those complaints aside, One Battle After Another still mostly works as a throwback gritty adventure film with that sort of tension you’d find in the 70s or more experimental movie eras. A bit more detail in fleshing out the world would have helped the tension level- this is more the kind of concept I feel could have worked better as maybe an HBO series.
Had this been developed for streaming and the audience had more of a chance to soak in the details of daily life in this world, I think it would have landded better for me. Like what happened in this version of history that got the French 75 started, more of Lockjaw's backstory, maybe it could ask how other citizens feel about what’s going on, maybe some of the Lockjaw soldiers are questioning themselves? I get it if Anderson was aiming to make the story feel more self contained though, and the acting quality generally keeps it above average.
No comments:
Post a Comment