One Battle After Another (2025)

Every time I sit down to a new movie by Paul Thomas Anderson, I am always asking myself ‘Okay, when does this START being a PTA movie?”  Thus far, he has never let me down.  There is a point at which I catch the train, at which I am on his wavelength and at which I understand what he is going for.  His new film One Battle After Another is the first film at which I kept waiting, and waiting and waiting.  I never got there, but that’s because he kept upending my expectations.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is about many things, many issues, many points of view, many of them broad perspectives.  It is an action thriller guised in a lot of perspectives about our current American landscape.  We are at a point in American history, he says, when things seem to be tipping at a point of revolution but there are so many reasons for a revolution that it is hard to pick one battle or another.  There are too many parts of our culture and our landscape that seem to be on fire all at the same time and it’s hard to figure out which one the pee on first.  Are we ripe for revolution?  He seems to thinks so.  And yet, he never time-stamps this epic.  It reveals many hard truths but it never names names, never slaps a MAGA hat on anything, never uses a common term.  It is loose like that.  Yes, there are border walls and detention centers and far-right racist secret societies.  But there’s something else going on, a personal and intimate detail given to his characters that is blindingly unexpected.

What he tries to do is to pare down the hardline revolutionaries – the people who actually put their bodies on the wheels – get us to feel the burning of their souls, and the follow the weary travels of what comes in the wake, how it disrupts their lives and what it does to families.  In that sense, this is a movie very much about its characters, who they are, what they stand for, and what they do to survive in a world that seems to be militarizing law and order.  Yet, he does all of this with a weirdly effective balance of good drama balanced delicately on the edge of satire.

The movie begins with the fire and energy that comes with an organized revolution as we see a hyper-motivated homeland revolutionary group calling itself Paris 75, as they crash a border detention center with the mission of rounding up border task force officers and freeing over three hundred immigrants housed there.  Most fiery is the curiously named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyona Taylor in an Oscar-worthy performance) who has the face and body of a supermodel but whose power in the moments of passionate revolution give you the vibes of Angela Davis, but you never sense that she’s serious about the actual mission so much as sucking the energy that comes from defying system.   

Marking down what will become the film’s throughline, she corners a twitchy, racist Army Colonel named Steven Lockjaw (played in a weird performance by Sean Penn) sexually humiliates him and puts him on the path of obsession that will follow him to the bitter end.

The revolutionary spirit of Paris 75, gets the job done but eventually it takes a toll on personal lives, as Perfidia and her lover Bob Ferguson (Leonard DiCaprio) have a child together and settle into a kind of domestic weariness that you never see in movies about revolutionaries.  We get gun battles, but how many have you ever seen that included postpartum depression?

Years go by, we meet that young girl now a teenager named Willa (Chase Infiniti) as Bob divides his time between doing what is necessary for the revolution and being a dad.  Perfidia, for reasons that I won’t reveal is out of the picture.  That doesn’t stop Lockjaw, whose obsession leads him to conduct raids on places where he thinks former Paris 75 members might me hiding out.  Its all in his pants, you see and therein lays most of the satire.

What happens next would be criminal to reveal, suffice to say that this is a movie might, in other hands, have been a tired, whining slog about our current racial, social and political climate with no binding agent.  But we care about these people.  We care about the drugged-out Bob.  We care about the fresh-faced Willa.  We want them to be reunited with Perfidia.  We want to see a solution to their problem that racist, hard-nosed authority seems hell-bent on keeping apart.  Is it because they are a mixed-race family?  Anderson doesn’t say, although it is hard to deny it when Lockjaw is inducted into a group called The Christmas Adventurers Club which is basically a 1% wealth edition of the Ku Klux Klan.  It might be called a clever blurring of these types of individuals, but when Lockjaw is awarded The Nathan Bedford Forrest Award, it is hard to see it that way.  I said Anderson doesn’t name names.  I didn’t say he was subtle about it.

I sat through ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER with mixed feelings.  The narrative moves in different directions and is always surprising you.  Just when you think that the movie is settling into one thing, it becomes something else.  When the opening detention breach was over and the story settled on the domestic strife between Bob and Perfidia, I imagined that the movie was just about what happens in the wake of revolution.  It was, and it wasn’t because switching forward in time to then tell Willa’s story gives the movie a different energy, and when her story becomes a rescue operation that leads to an action climax, you’re kind of amazed that the film doesn’t become a jumble of perfunctory action set-pieces.  There is a chase in the final act that is as good as anything in BULLIT or THE FRENCH CONNECTION or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. 

But that’s all a window dressing.  What makes ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER so special is that Anderson wants us to care about his characters.  They are not just pegs to move around.  They are real, they are defiant and we feel their pain.  It would be easy to simply sneer down your nose at the social climate and toss off the same kind of cynical nonsense, but Anderson wants us to understand that every revolution affects a life, a family.