[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Is it just me? Is everyone else in on the joke? Am I the only one who has no idea what the punch line is and when it’s our cue to laugh? Has everyone but me been issued the secret decoder ring that makes sense of all this? Am I too sensitive? Too Catholic? Too old? Too grounded in objective reality? Or is it drugs? Some audience members, in a movie theater, receive 3-D glasses. Do some viewers receive a magic mushroom concoction that renders schlock beatific?
That’s what I was thinking as I sat in my local multiplex showing the new film One Battle after Another. Critics tout it as a “masterpiece.” Rotten Tomatoes reports that One Battle after Another has a 96% positive score. The National Public Radio program, Pop Culture Happy Hour, called One Battle after Another “awe-inspiring,” “eye-poppingly beautiful,” “really, really fun,” “a masterclass,” “firing on all cylinders,” full of “painterly compositions.” The crew at the Next Best Picture podcast devoted four hours – four hours! – to slathering praise on the film. To these young guys, One Battle after Another is one of the greatest films ever made. In the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg crowns One Battle after Another an “anti-fascist film.”
Is it just me?
One Battle after Another’s depiction of sexual perversion made my skin crawl. Its celebration and romanticization of terrorism repelled me. The plot and characterizations presented one big, fat lie after another. One Battle after Another is violent, hateful, racist, anti-white, anti-black, anti-American, and Christophobic. The film’s cheap exploitation of the Holocaust disgusted me. The filmmaker should be forced to take sensitivity training from the Holocaust Memorial Museum. As the film progressed, I began to feel more bored than offended. I realized that I’d seen the film’s entire bag of tricks. White people are rotten to the core. Are, in fact, when you scratch the surface, actual Christmas-carol singing Nazis. Black women are animalistically sexual, murderously violent, and they all have potty mouths and are hot for white men. I’m ready for this movie to be over. But it just kept going and going and going for almost three hours. Afterward, I felt I needed a long shower. I received the antidote to this movie in a ShopRite parking lot. More on that, below.
Why did I end up in a movie theater screening such a lousy film? I’ll talk about myself for a second here in order to speak, I think, for many. My health took a swan dive last November. Ever since, I’ve been in doctor’s offices, hospitals, waiting rooms, imaging centers, at least one day out of ten. My eyes hunger for new landscapes. I like to go, as often as I can, to the shore or a wildlife refuge or even walk the streets of a nearby town, and I haven’t been able to do that, and I’m starting to feel visual cabin fever. I craved to go to the movies just to look at scenes that I don’t see everyday, to hear different voices, to observe different costumes. Critics assured me that One Battle after Another is not just a good movie, but a “fun” movie. They reported that the movie is “beautiful” and “profound” and that it encapsulates America at this historical moment. Critics promised a car chase better than the car chase in The French Connection.
As I was watching One Battle after Another, I felt I could sense a great groaning in the land. I’m not the only one who’s having a tough time. Recent shootings cast a pall over our lives and cause us to fear for our nation. Inflation, instability, national and family rifts. As a quote from Rev. John Watson, variously phrased, goes, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle you know nothing about.” Life kicks you in the keister. One of the blessings of that kick, if it can be called a blessing, is that you are invited to become aware that any given person you meet might be going through a time as tough, or even tougher, than what you are going through. No one looking at me could guess at my current medical challenges. Similarly, I know that the driver who failed to use her turn signal, or the man sitting alone in the back of the church, might also be burdened, overwhelmed, terrified, and acting the brave soldier just to get through the day.
We, all of us fighting those hard battles that no one else knows anything about, we all could benefit from the mini-escape a good movie offers. From beauty. From depth, complex character development, characters we can recognize as humans like ourselves or people we know. These characters face challenges, make choices, and rise or fall. Accompanying evocative characters on their fictional journeys expands our souls.
Movies have been one of my go-to medicines. A therapeutic movie doesn’t have to be a lighthearted musical or comedy. It doesn’t have to be Singing in the Rain or Airplane! It might be Saving Private Ryan or Schindler’s List. These films depicted horror, but they inspired me. “Earn this,” Tom Hanks says, as he dies fighting evil. At the end of Schindler’s List, Liam Neeson, as rescuer Oskar Schindler, cries. “I could have saved more!” Ben Kingsley, playing one of the Jews Schindler saved, says, “There are 1,100 people alive because of you. Generations will live because of you.” I wanted to be a better person after seeing these movies. Maybe I was a better person because of these movies.
One Battle after Another made me sick. That’s a common phrase, but I mean it literally here. I walked out of that film feeling worse than when I walked in.
I asked myself, am I naive? Why I am so sickened by this film’s depiction of perverse sex and terroristic violence? Should I be watching more violent, amoral films, more online porn in order to become just as desensitized as the critics who loved this movie? But I realized, I’ve seen plenty of very dark stuff in real life. That doesn’t mean I want to pay to watch senseless darkness in movies. My dad lead men in combat in the Pacific Theater. He once rode in a combat zone in the same jeep with General Douglas MacArthur. The war that he survived was terrifying and gruesome. And my dad would have walked out of One Battle after Another.
Enough ranting. Let’s get to the objective facts.
One Battle after Another is a dark comedy / action thriller. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Tony Goldwyn, and Benicio del Toro. It is two hours and forty-two minutes long. It was released in the US on September 26, 2025.
Fifty-five-year-old writer and director Paul Thomas Anderson is widely praised as one of the most important filmmakers alive today. He has been nominated for eleven Academy Awards. His films include Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, and Licorice Pizza. Anderson was born in Studio City, Los Angeles. His father was in show business. Anderson attended prestigious private schools. He planned from childhood to be a film director.
Though a critical darling, Anderson does not make films that generate large box office. Rotten Tomatoes reports that “Anderson’s previous nine films have grossed a total of just over $170 million.” In movie terms, that’s not a lot. Punch Drunk Love, The Master, Inherent Vice, and Licorice Pizza did not make back their production budgets. One Battle after Another just opened but even so, Slash Film offers “5 Reasons Why One Battle after Another Flopped At The Box Office.” Anderson continues to receive backing, through, because his films are awards magnets.
Anderson has been in a relationship with Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph since 2021. Rudolph’s Jewish father was a composer. Her mother, singer Minnie Riperton, was black. Anderson and Rudolph have four children. The Next Best Picture reviewers cite Anderson’s family life as inspiration for One Battle after Another, as the film depicts the relationship between a white father and a mixed-race daughter.
After a summary of the film’s plot, below, I’ll offer a rundown of critical-versus-audience reaction to the film.
One Battle after Another opens as the French 75, a group of black and white American terrorists, descends on a border crossing between the US and Mexico. Given the name of the terrorist group, you’ve probably already figured out that after watching One Battle after Another, viewers will have to spend hours on Google trying to figure it out. I went to Google to discover why the terrorist group was called “French 75.” Google says that “French 75” is the name of a cocktail made of gin, simple syrup, lemon juice, and champagne. “What does ordering a French 75 say about you?” Google asked me. I clicked to discover the answer. Google informed me that someone who orders a French 75 is “a sophisticated yet adventurous personality that enjoys a drink with a kick but also a touch of elegance. It indicates you’re adventurous and perhaps cosmopolitan, enjoying a timeless cocktail that is as powerful as its historical namesake, the French 75 mm field gun.” So the film begins with a terrorist group whose name renders the group “sophisticated and yet adventurous.” Have you figured out, yet, how snotty this movie is?
Perfidia Beverly Hills – that’s her real character name – struts. She’s wearing a tight, midriff-bearing top. Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia. During the raid on the border crossing, Perfidia meets a border soldier, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. Yes, that is the character’s real name. He is played by a very wrinkled and overacting Sean Penn, aka “Hollywood’s Biggest Psycho.” Penn, like Paul Thomas Anderson, is a son of show business professionals.
Perfidia and Lockjaw engage in a sadomasochistic sexual encounter, with Perfidia playing the dominatrix and Lockjaw playing the submissive. Penn, hamming it up for the folks in the back row of the theater, communicates that Lockjaw is highly sexually aroused by his encounter with Perfidia.
The French 75 take over the border crossing and usher detained illegal immigrants onto a truck. They will escort the immigrants into the United States.
There is a film montage of French 75 terror activity. Ghetto Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a terrorist bomber. He is shown making bombs and instructing Perfidia in bomb-making. Perfidia is his lover. As Ghetto Pat describes the bomb-making process, Perfidia becomes sexually aroused. She licks Ghetto Pat’s tongue eagerly, thus communicating to the audience what a hot black female she is. Perfidia also uses the f-word in every sentence and she enjoys violence. She never smiles. She is, in short, a stereotype of a hyper-sexualized, violent, angry, uncouth, black female.
Lockjaw is a rigid, emotionally frozen, white supremacist. He has never recovered from the S&M encounter he had with Perfidia. He follows her around and gazes longingly at her prominent buttocks. Since Lockjaw is staring at Perfidia’s buttocks, director Anderson and the audience does, too. Her buttocks fill the screen. Taylor is, in short, objectified.
Perfidia is planting one of Ghetto Pat’s bombs in a public restroom. Lockjaw approaches Perfidia from behind. He says he will not interfere with her career as a terrorist if she agrees to another S&M encounter with him. She agrees. They meet in a hotel. Perfidia, again, sexually dominates Lockjaw. She uses a handgun as a sex toy. Lockjaw is aroused. He impregnates Perfidia.
Ghetto Pat assumes that Perfidia’s baby is his daughter. Perfidia gripes angrily. “My nipples hurt!” Being a mother is not sexy and it is not violent so it is not to Perfidia’s taste. Perfidia again acts an anti-black-woman stereotype. She abandons her baby with Ghetto Pat. Ghetto Pat will raise Perfidia’s baby alone. He’s a responsible white guy. Somehow the critics fawning over this mess never seem to notice the racial stereotypes.
Perfidia and others rob a bank. During the robbery, a black woman struts atop the bank tellers’ desks, shouting, “I am Junglepussy! This is what black power looks like!”
The character Junglepussy is played by a rapper who calls herself Junglepussy. In 2013, Junglepussy released a video titled “Cream Team.” Her lyrics include “Hustle hustle that pussy muscle,” and “Keep the cooties out ya coochie. Keep it classy bitch!”
During the bank robbery, Perfidia shoots a black guard dead. Lockjaw puts Perfidia in the witness protection program, rather than prison, in exchange for her betraying her comrades in French 75. Lockjaw hunts down Perfidia’s comrades and carries out extrajudicial assassinations of many of them. Ghetto Pat and Perfidia’s daughter take on new identities and go on the lam. They will henceforth be Bob and Willa Ferguson.
Fans of American popular song now know why Perfidia was named Perfidia. “Perfidia” means “betrayal” in Spanish. Decades ago, Xavier Cugat, Glen Miller, Nat King Cole and even the Ventures had hits with the song, written by Alberto Dominguez.
The “Perfidia” song does appear in Jonny Greenwood’s soundtrack for One Battle after Another. Greenwood’s soundtrack is obvious as a barn door, heavy-handed, and manipulative. The film veers from broad comedy to sexual perversion to hate-fueled violence. The soundtrack pounds into the viewer – you will laugh now. You will feel suspense now. You will cry now. We viewers are not allowed to discover, through the action, that Perfidia can’t be trusted. She’s literally named “betrayal” and a song about betrayal plays on the soundtrack.
After Lockjaw completes his decimation of the French 75, he drives to Perfidia’s witness protection hideout, a suburban home. He is carrying a bouquet of roses. He loves Perfidia and wants to build a life with her. But Perfidia has fled to Mexico. Lockjaw discovers an empty house and a note from Perfidia. “This pussy don’t pop for you,” the note reads.
The line is from a Junglepussy rap, which goes like this: “This pussy don’t pop for you,” repeated twelve times. Junglepussy also complains that “Sometimes I give it to the wrong n——, ungrateful m———–s, soul suckers.” Tell me again who is racist? Tell me again who is obsessed with repeating the n-word and disseminating negative stereotypes of ignorant, foul-mouthed, sexually incontinent black women and unreliable black men? If you answered Paul Thomas Anderson and the fans of this movie, you get an A on this quiz.
Sixteen years later, Lockjaw is invited to join a secret society named the Christmas Adventurers Club. The Christmas Adventurers Club is a group of sadistic, omnipotent, genocidal, American white supremacists. Their mouthpiece is Virgil Throckmorton (Tony Goldwyn). Yes, I did ask Google why the name. I got no real answers, other than it’s a way for Paul Thomas Anderson to stick a finger in the eye of Christians everywhere.
Again, Jonny Greenwood’s score hits viewers over the head. As a scene of the nefarious activities of the evil white supremacists of the Christmas Adventurers Club is depicted onscreen, the soundtrack plays, in full, Ella Fitzgerald’s rousing rendition of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
To music lovers like me, Ella Fitzgerald is a goddess. She was nicknamed “The First Lady of Song.” Fitzgerald survived Jim Crow with unimpeachable dignity. Her class, grace, and talent demonstrated the falsehood of racism. Fitzgerald was supported by allies like Frank Sinatra. Sinatra made it a point to sing, on television, side by side with Fitzgerald and to advance her career; see here and here. Sinatra said of Fitzgerald, “She is the only performer with whom I’ve ever worked who made me nervous, because I try to work up to what she does … I believe she is the greatest popular singer in the world. Barring none, male or female.”
Filmmaker Anderson and his many fans embrace lyricists and role models like Junglepussy and pervert the legacy of heroines like Ella Fitzgerald – all to stick in a finger in the eye of Christians, and to create an association between a classic Christmas carol and pure evil. It’s like watching American culture commit suicide.
Lockjaw is thrilled to be invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club. Because the club is white supremacist, Lockjaw decides that he must hunt down and kill his daughter.
Ghetto Pat, now Bob Ferguson, and a girl he believes to be his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), are living in Baktan Cross. Why Baktan Cross? Google says it is likely a reference to a baktun, that is, a unit of time in the ancient Mayan calendar. Perhaps more appropriately, “Baktan Cross” is an anagram of “actors’ banks.”
The remnants of French 75 learn of Lockjaw’s threat. Lockjaw orchestrates an ICE-style raid on Baktan Cross. Violence breaks out. Skateboarders are prominent, as they were during the George Floyd protests. Some, during those protests, used their skateboards as assault weapons and also to damage police cars. In Anderson’s film, skateboarders are filmed traversing rooftops. Their dark silhouettes are framed against the fires from riots.
Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro) is a leader of the illegal immigrants living in Baktan Cross. Bob asks Sergio for help. Sergio gives Bob a gun and drops him in the countryside. Deandra, a French 75 member, has driven Willa to a simulated convent. Here, in the desert, black women dress like Catholic nuns, grow and sell marijuana, use the f-word a lot, and shoot high powered weapons. They call themselves “Sisters of the Brave Beaver.”
Real nuns, of course, have been world-changing heroines who don’t marry but who do study, learn, teach, heal, build, and feed the poor. Nuns were significant in risking their lives to save Jewish children during the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. In America, nuns like Mother Seton, Katharine Drexel, and Mother Cabrini were powerhouses who pioneered education including for the poor and black and Native Americans. Anderson insults those women and insists, again, that a woman, at least a black woman, is nothing but a vagina, a “pussy,” a “beaver.”
There’s a chase scene. No, the chase scene is not better than the chase scene in The French Connection. Lockjaw reaches Willa before Bob. Lockjaw hands Willa over to a hitman, Avanti. Avanti hesitates. He doesn’t want to kill a child. Also, Avanti is Native American, so he is good. Avanti, to avoid killing Willa himself, hands her over to a group of white men who will kill her. Avanti has second thoughts, and he shoots the white hitmen, but they also shoot him. Willa drives off.
A hitman hired by the Christmas Adventurers Club shoots at Lockjaw. Lockjaw drives off the road. The hitman then chases Willa. Willa shoots him dead. Bob catches up with Willa and they enjoy a heartwarming reunion.
Lockjaw survives the assassination attempt and car accident. He is summoned to the Christmas Adventurers Club, where he is told he can join. He is thrilled. He is escorted to an empty office that will be his. He sits in a chair at a desk. An air vent in the ceiling emits poison gas. Lockjaw breathes in the gas and dies. Men in hazmat suits arrive and carry Lockjaw to an incinerator. His body is shown being devoured by flames. This scene alludes to the Holocaust. Jews and other victims were locked in airtight rooms. Poison gas was dropped from ceiling vents. Bodies were incinerated. Thomas’ exploitation of the Holocaust for his movie is obscene.
Bob and Willa sit around a kitchen table. They read a heart-warming letter from Perfidia. Perfidia expresses motherly feelings. Willa heads out to a demonstration. The end.
Even on its own terms, this film makes no sense. There’s no reason for the major action of the plot, that is, Lockjaw’s determination to murder his daughter, and, subsequently, the Christmas Adventurers Club members determination to murder his daughter and then him. American white supremacists and Nazis as well looked the other way when in-group men had sex with out-group women, as long as that sex didn’t cross over into a real relationships. Nazis raped Jewish and Slavic women during World War II. They bragged about such exploits. White slave-owners having sex with enslaved black women was so common that the average African American has 24% European ancestry.
Ghetto Pat, aka Bob, is the one decent white man. He is a terrorist bomber. But he’s a good guy, because he had a black lover and he is raising that woman’s mixed-race child. His love for black women absolves him of any damage his bombs did to human bodies.
The movie depicts its lovable, heroic characters, Sensei Sergio and Bob the bomber, as helping illegal immigrants gain entry into the United States. The film opens with French 75 transporting illegal immigrants, and Sensei Sergio runs what the film calls an “Underground Railroad” for illegal immigrants into the United States. At the same time, One Battle after Another depicts America as a racist hellhole run by a genocidal, white supremacist cabal. How, then, are French 75’s and Sensei Sergio’s efforts to shepherd immigrants into the United States a noble activity, worth risking one’s life and one’s fortune to perform? Anderson may be a genius but he didn’t see that gaping hole in his plot.
Is it just me?
No. No, it is not just me.
One Battle after Another’s reviews from amateur, rather than professional reviewers, are love-it-or-hate-it. There are almost as many one-star reviews as five-out-of-five star reviews. Quotes from some one-star, amateur reviews, below.
IMDB FAN writes that the film “reveals far more about Hollywood’s own disillusionment with reality than it does about America today … this movie isn’t fearless; it’s safe. It reassures the cultural elites who already believe the world is run by villains only they can see. Meanwhile, average Americans who watch their cities decline, their speech censored, and their traditions ridiculed will see this film for what it really is: another Hollywood fantasy, divorced from reality.”
MarkSullivan40 writes “this supposed masterpiece is just another liberal Hollywood lecture, peddling violence as the cure for society’s problems … revolutionary carnage in your face with blockbuster special effects. The unstated promise? Keep hammering the system … and somehow a better world will crawl out from under the rubble … Its true message is reckless and willfully blind to its potential impact on fragile minds. It’s a thinly veiled call to arms, disguised under the veneer of auteur respectability.”
GeorgeZ observes ” You want to change the world? Blowing up innocent people is not the way.”
Thomas Smith points out that “Sean Penn takes time from his hobby of beating women to lecture America about morals.”
Steven Broch’s very funny review includes “A gloomy parade of clichés, shot with the self-importance of a documentary about rare moss … it drains you. I left the theater feeling not just bored but somehow wronged, as though I’d been promised a fine dinner and served a damp napkin.”
Mike Ayers takes the prize. “This movie gave me the same feeling that … I would have if I was abandoned alone in the universe right before the Big Crunch and watched as all of God’s creation collapsed into a burning singularity … demanded my money back … and I make six figures … I’ve never written a movie review before, but I’m hurt.”
Like the above-quoted reviewers, after watching One Battle after Another, I felt sick, and I needed an antidote. I stumbled across that antidote accidentally, because ShopRite had new crop apples on sale — .77 cents a pound!
On my way home from the theater, I parked in the ShopRite parking lot. You can tell a lot about humanity from a crowded grocery store parking lot. Who returns his or her shopping cart? Who smacks the hungry and crying kid, and who patiently and lovingly distracts the kid with a joke or a toy? Who never makes eye contact with other shoppers, but stares ahead as if buying groceries were the assault on Anzio, a do-or-die proposition, and the only route to victory is to defeat as many other shoppers as possible by cutting off their carts in the aisles? Who notices the old lady with the cane and the unsteady gait – me – and waits while she makes her way through the traffic?
What I saw of America on that healing trip to ShopRite exposed One Battle after Another as a big, fat lie. I saw Americans of various skin shades and religious beliefs mostly being decent human beings. Most people did let me pass in spite of my cane and my slowness. Most people were nice to their kids. Many stopped to chat with other shoppers or store staff. Store staff were endlessly patient with customers trying to figure out how to get the special deals.
Many of the creators of One Battle after Another are either lifelong show business professionals or are the descendants of show business professionals and other performers. Chase Infiniti was named after two movie characters, one from Batman, the other from Toy Story. One Battle after Another is not a movie about life. It’s a movie about movies created by people who have never lived any length of time outside of the entertainment-extruding factory.
Tony Goldwyn, who plays the mouthpiece of the Christmas Adventurers club, is the grandson of Sam Goldwyn, a cherished name to anyone who loves Golden Age Hollywood films.
Sam Goldwyn was born Szmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw to Aaron Gelbfisz, a Hasidic peddler. Teenage Gelbfisz walked five hundred miles from Poland to Germany. He trained as a glove maker. He emigrated to New York and found work in Gloversville, the center of American glove manufacturing. After achieving success in the glove business, Goldwyn moved on to making movies. Goldwyn lived in the real world before entering the imaginary world of movie-making.
As a filmmaker, Goldwyn was known for his drive for quality. The New York Times eulogized him as a “driving perfectionist” and a “benign tyrant.” Goldwyn’s “quest for the excellent often enraged Mr. Goldwyn’s employees, but more often than not it gave his productions, that sheen of quality and good taste that became known in the motion picture industry as ‘the Goldwyn touch.'”
In 1946, Sam Goldwyn produced The Best Years of Our Lives, which won seven Academy Awards, including for best picture. Both One Battle after Another and The Best Years of Our Lives have been characterized by critics as movies that capture a moment in American life.
Though it was released on November 21, 1946, only fifteen months after the end of World War II, The Best Years of Our Lives does capture key themes of post-war America. It captures beauty and it captures ugliness, desperation, and characters’ tentative steps into a frightening void, the future, that they can only hope will be better. The final lines of the film sum up that void. A veteran is asking a woman to marry him. He says, “You know what it’ll be, don’t you, Peggy? It may take us years to get anywhere. We’ll have no money, no decent place to live. We’ll have to work, get kicked around … ” and the film ends on that ellipses.
As The Best Years of Our Lives begins, three combat veterans return from war to their changed hometown. One left his hands in the war zone. He is played by real amputee vet Harold Russell. An antisemitic conspiracy theorist tells this vet that he lost his hands for nothing. Another vet, a bank executive, struggles with alcoholism, alienation from his children, and conflict with his boss when he extends a loan to a rough-hewn, plain-spoken veteran with an immigrant last name – Novak.
Vivid nightmares torment Fred Derry, a third veteran. Night after night, Derry witnesses, yet again, a fellow airman burning alive. Overseas, Derry had been a valued fighter pilot. In America, he can’t find a job. His wife leaves him. He returns to his father, living in a shack on the railroad track. In one of the most heart-wrenching scenes ever filmed, his father discovers, and reads, a commendation letter his “loser” son received for his service in combat – see here.
The Best Years of Our Lives was everything One Battle after Another‘s promoters claim it to be. It captured an American moment. It told tough truths. It offered a route to healing for veterans and an entire country. It was celebrated by film critics and beloved by audiences, who made it a huge box office hit. Influential French film critic Andre Bazin praised director William Wyler’s use of deep focus. Bosley Crowther, in the New York Times, called the film “beautiful,” “inspiring,” and “humanizing.” Today’s critics recognize its worth; Rotten Tomatoes records a 98% positive score. How is it that Hollywood could release a movie this powerful a mere fifteen months after the end of World War II, and yet Hollywood fails to capture our own historical moment?
MacKinlay Kantor wrote the book on which Best Years was based. During World War II, Kantor was a war correspondent with the RAF. He did fly with combat pilots, and, against military regulations, he operated guns. Director William Wyler served as a major in the United States Army Air Force. He risked his life and his health in combat zones directing films that advanced America’s fight against fascism. Frederic March, who starred in the film, had served in the army in World War I. And of course Harold Russell was a veteran. Maybe Hollywood was able to create a film like Best Years so soon after the war because the film’s creators included so many who were baptized in the reality of war and post-war homecoming.
Or maybe it’s us. Maybe American audiences have been so inured by violent media, online porn, social media hatred, and mass shootings that a movie like Best Years of Our Lives could never reach a mainstream audience today.
Best Years clearly wanted to heal a nation wounded by war. I can’t read Paul Thomas Anderson’s mind, but I can read the comments of those endorsing his work. Both published professionals, like Michelle Goldberg in the Times, who says that the film depicts “what’s worth fighting for” and amateur reviewers say that the film is inspirational. If they feel inspired to be like the film’s hero, Bob, and take the path of violence, I want to assign some reading to them. They could read about Lamar Demetrius Hulse. Thirty-year-old Lamar loved his grandmother, and he took care of her. He enjoyed evenings at home, listening to music. He worked as a security guard. Or they could read about Abigail Medina, a 46-year-old Sunday school teacher and mother of 18-year-old and 14-year-old daughters. Or Kevin Donnelly, a firefighter, who loved the beach so much he “kept a bathing suit, a towel and goggles in his car at all times, just in case.”
I never met any of these people, but I read about them, in the New York Times, in a feature titled “Portraits in Grief.” They were some of the almost three thousand Americans murdered by terrorists on 9-11. The Times published brief biographies of victims. Reading those brief biographies is emotionally overwhelming. It’s easy to make a movie romanticizing terrorism. It’s a bit harder to confront what happens after someone like Ghetto Pat plants a bomb.
If you are looking for a good movie that depicts the realities of resistance, I offer, below, some of my own personal favorites. This list is not systematic, but if you watch every film on it, you will realize that resistance often involves boring and frustrating hours of organizing. It may require an innocent young girl to prostitute herself. It may result in an entire village, Lidice, being wiped off the map as retaliation for the success of your operation. And resistance is often ver lonely.
Man of Marble 1977. Andrzej Wajda, director. Stalinists raise up and then destroy a “model” worker. A crusading woman journalist works to uncover the truth. Also see Wajda’s films Kanal, about Poles fighting Nazis from Warsaw’s sewers, and Ashes and Diamonds, about the post-war struggle against invading Russian Communists.
Romero 1989. John Duigan, director. Archbishop Oscar Romero confronts a military regime in El Salvador.
Eyes on the Prize. PBS. 1987 – 1990. History of the American Civil Rights Movement.
Rustin 2023. George C. Wolfe director. Bayard Rustin organizes the March on Washington.
Norma Rae 1979. Martin Ritt, director. A garment worker organizes her fellow workers into a union. Based on the life of Crystal Lee Sutton.
Matewan 1987. John Sayles, director. Dramatizes a 1920 West Virginia coal miners’ strike.
Anthropoid 2016. Sean Ellis, director. One Czech and one Slovak hitman assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, known as the Butcher of Prague and the main architect of the final solution.
The Two Popes 2019. Fernando Meirelles, director. In flashbacks, Pope Francis is seen struggling with his clerical duties during the Argentine military junta.
Gandhi 1982. Richard Attenborough, director. Yes, it’s a hagiography, but it’s also an excellent film.
1776 1972. Peter H. Hunt, director.
Lust, Caution 2007. Ang Lee, director. A glossy, sexy movie based on a true story. A young Chinese girl is recruited to lure a collaborator into a honey pot. She puts her humanity first, to disastrous consequences for herself and others.
The American Revolution 2025. Ken Burns. Haven’t seen it yet, but the trailer looks great.
Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery.