Photo © Warner Bros.
One Battler After Another (2025) - Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another (2025)
Paul Thomas Anderson was one of the last significant directors to emerge from the explosion of talent in the ‘90s. He introduced himself with the hardboiled Hard Eight (1996), but turned to more ambitious undertakings, imaginative literary adaptations including There Will Be Blood (2007), inspired by Upton Sinclair, and Inherent Vice (2014), based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel. Anderson returns to Pynchon for One Battle After Another, which thrusts the 1990 novel Vineland into the present moment with almost frightening veracity.
If One Battle After Another had been shot on videocams with B-list actors, one could suppose production began during week one of the current administration and wrapped as troops arrived on the LA streets. But Anderson filmed the movie in VistaVision and 70mm, casting it with Leonardo DiCaprio, Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn. It was ahead of its time when he made it and is provocatively well timed upon release. A well-thumbed copy of Project 2025 might have been as much a source as Pynchon as he worked on the production in 2024.
When the novelist wrote Vineland, he was reflecting on the comic absurdity of the ‘60s counterculture and the conservative reaction that took hold by the ‘80s. Anderson yanks the story into a place that resembles now. One Battle opens as a revolutionary group, the unlikely named French 75, pulls off a successful assault on a migrant detention center, cutting through the chain-link and holding guards at gunpoint before loading an 18-wheeler with more than 100 rescued detainees. French 75’s leader, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor), is Angela Davis redux, waving a handgun and shouting “Revolutionary violence is the only way!” Perfidia’s lover and sidekick, the more restrained but resourceful Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio), makes bombs on their kitchen table.
Perfidia’s encounter with the camp commandant, Captain (later Colonel) Lockjaw (Penn), becomes the story’s fulcrum. The scowling officer is horny and twisted, aroused by being disarmed by a Black woman, and afterward he shadows her, even lets her off the hook for a bombing attempt in exchange for sex. When caught after she finally kills somebody during a display of militant zeal, he gets her to name names and puts her in the protected witness program, an invisible prison from which she escapes.
Cut to 16 years later. Bob was left with her child, a daughter Perfidia didn’t seem to want. DiCaprio shifts easily into comedy, playing the older Bob as an alcoholic pothead dad, hiding from the law, paranoid yet increasingly careless. Has he ever really processed his betrayal at the hands of his revolutionary sweetheart? Bob never entirely jettisoned his radical sentiments (he watches Battle of Algiers when home alone) but he was never French 75’s deep thinker. His teenage daughter Willa gets better guidance from her sensei, Sergio St. Carlos (del Toro), whose calm, Zen-like centeredness when facing calamity is comedic in another mode, close to the character he played in The Phoenician Scheme by that other Anderson, the one named Wes.
The (almost) final twist in a story packed with twists: Lockjaw seeks membership in a powerful white nationalist secret society, the Christmas Adventurers Club, but the vetting process turns up rumors of his sexual adventures with Perfidia. Miscegenation is a no go, especially if it’s true that he’s Willa’s biological father. To erase the evidence by silencing Bob and Willa, Lockjaw launches a rogue operation so heavy-handed that eyebrows are raised in the bunker that serves as the Adventurers clubhouse.
In One Battle After Another, the streets fill with rioters and riot police, Molotov cocktails volley with tear gas, and thuggish cops dressed for combat impose draconian immigration policies. Suspects are detained in cages. French 75 is the Weather Underground with steroid injections coupled with the antic frenzy of the Symbionese Liberation Army—a resistance fantasy of well-drilled commandos running an underground railroad for asylum seekers in a society where authoritarianism has been licensed. It’s a long movie with many digressions but Anderson keeps his foot on the accelerator as he races through a story that now seems less like fiction and more like tomorrow’s news.
