One Battle After Another: A Worthy Best Picture Contender

Cassandra Kulukundis. Remember the name, because she's the woman who assembled probably the most impressive cast I've seen in a movie this year. This is a double-edged sword, because all of these AAA actors that Cassandra rounded up cost Warner Bros a fortune, a fortune that lost them around $100 million by the time One Battle After Another finished its theatrical run. In many ways, I can understand why this movie was a flop. It's a large-scale and obviously political thriller, which means that many people of a particular persuasion were likely to avoid it once the news of its partisan tendencies broke. It also means the conversation surrounding it will be very predictable. One side will dismiss it as woke, and the other will pretend that it's an entirely fair and realistic portrayal of the American right; both will talk past each other, and we will collectively learn nothing while simultaneously pretending to be the pinnacle of human civilization. But hey, at least the movie was great. It works as both a large-scale spectacle and a laser-intimate character drama set against the backdrop of a divided America in love with rhetorical and ideological extremes. Hey, you may say, that sounds like us! Yes and no. The one thing missing from this movie is an ounce of nuance. If this spring's Eddington leaned a tad too far into bothsidesism, then One Battle is sympathetic to the left, maybe too sympathetic, and this is coming from someone who hasn't considered himself a Republican for almost five years. Still, even if it prefers demolishing bridges to building them, the craft of this movie remains absolutely undeniable.

The movie follows Bob, a former revolutionary who is drawn back into his old lifestyle after his daughter goes missing. Except Bob doesn't live in Slovenia or some other Eastern European country where you'd expect political upheaval to be the norm. He lives in America, a nation that seems to be heading in that direction with a head of steam and no brakes. Hot on both his heels and the tail of the leftist French 75 militia is Colonel Lockjaw, a man sexually obsessed with Perfidia, a French 75 militant. If you think there's no way this ends well for everyone involved, you're right. But I was very impressed by how this movie managed to ground a story this sprawling around the tight core that is its very intriguing core cast, even if they don't all walk away from the ordeal.

One Battle After Another is different from any other blockbuster I've seen, and this isn't hyperbole. The first very obvious thing about it is how different it looks from other movies being made these days. While unmistakably shot on modern cameras, it has a near-vintage sheen evocative of movies from the 1970s. It's a neat effect, one I'd liken to reading a classic comic book. Nevertheless, One Battle is far from a mere exercise in style. Its cast of characters is a collection of colorful and fascinating people played by skilled and experienced actors. My personal favorite is Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw, a competent yet perfectly insecure military colonel who makes for a villain with a lot of surprising layers. Lockjaw has what is, for all intents and purposes, a psychosexual relationship with a revolutionary named Perfidia, and watching the chemistry swirl between two sworn enemies was captivating. All of this makes for a twisted web of obsession and uncertainty that caught me off guard with its complexity and weight. Politically and philosophically, this movie is as subtle and measured as a shovel blow to the head. But it still works, partially because the concept of revolution has never been particularly nuanced, and partially because what it's really about - its many interesting characters and their complex relationships - is captivating.

Again, from Sean Penn to Leonardo DiCaprio to Benicio Del Toro, the cast of One Battle After Another is one of the most star-studded lineups I've ever seen in a movie, and every member is put to great use. Even if Lockjaw takes the cake for me, DiCaprio's performance as the slowly decaying former revolutionary Bob Ferguson proves that he's the real deal when it comes to acting yet again. Every character in this movie is also helped out by its creative and top-of-the-line technical specifications. I really liked the jumpy and piano-heavy score of this movie, which sounds like a fun and tonally appropriate parody of French Resistance movies. It made the movie seem perfectly frantic, wonderfully kinetic, and even a little timeless. The editing by Andy Jurgensen (Licorice Pizza) is smart and efficient. One of my favorite moments in this movie features Colonel Lockjaw interviewing a group of people he suspects are involved with revolutionaries. Jurgensen and the rest of the editors cut the sequence in such a way that each interrogation of one person blended seamlessly into the next, like some free-flowing river of questions. This movie doesn't just tell an absorbing story. It tells it well.

While its technical prowess is undeniable, I do want to once again address some of the ways in which One Battle After Another engages with our modern culture here in America. Please take this as a commentary on the helpfulness of its cultural criticisms, not a direct indication of some inherent flaw in its filmmaking. I understand that virtually everyone on the left who has talked about this movie has given it glowing marks and praised it as a biting critique of the American right, but I'll be honest with you and say that I'm not sure it's the most helpful movie at this moment in time, especially in a year where a notable conservative speaker was gunned down for nothing more than stating his opinion. I'm not naive enough to spout hyperbole about how this movie will inspire copycats, but it certainly doesn't do a whole lot to spark conversations - the exact thing this imperfect but I believe well-intentioned speaker was trying to do. One Battle After Another works exceptionally well as an old-fashioned tale of good versus evil, but don't let journalists con you into thinking that it fairly or honestly assesses our political climate; anyone who tells you otherwise is either naive, a wishful thinker, or has never actually met a conservative in their entire life. But maybe I'm being unfairly nitpicky with this movie. The problem I have is not with it so much as it is with those who have willfully misrepresented what it actually is: a very good work of fiction. Personally, I'll be delighted if this movie wins Best Picture at the Oscars, an accolade I wholeheartedly believe it deserves. Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of One Battle After Another, pats those with whom he agrees on the back for almost three hours with this movie. And somehow, he makes it fun to watch, too.

One Battle After Another - 10/10

Proverbs 17:14-15