Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest work, One Battle After Another, is a triumphant and ostentatious spectacle about morally repugnant monsters. “The message is clear,” declares one of its pseudo-protagonists in the opening scene, “free borders and free bodies.”
Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Bob Ferguson, a burnt-out radical whose paranoia and half-functioning memory cells are all that remain from his revolutionary heyday. Alongside his girlfriend, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), he belongs to the French 75, a Weather Underground–style militant group obsessed with open-border utopianism. Take what you will from the fact that nowhere in Anderson’s screenplay are they referred to as “terrorists”; instead, the film offers such coy euphemisms as “revolutionaries.”
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DiCaprio plays Ferguson like a Jeff Lebowski who made friends with Bill Ayers instead of Walter. “I fried my brain with weed and alcohol,” he admits after forgetting a password. DiCaprio disappears into the role, channeling the panic and paranoia of a terrorist on the run with barely a dozen brain cells to his name. It’s never entirely clear whether he’s animated by genuine socialist conviction or simply stumbling along as a love-drunk, impressionable idiot rather than a true zealot.
Albeit inseparable at first, it is when the couple has a child that their priorities glaringly diverge. Ferguson wastes no time abandoning his revolutionary penchants for parenting and fatherhood. Perfidia, meanwhile, shows no interest in motherhood, referring to the enterprise as a wicked and patriarchal distraction from her Marxist overthrow of the U.S. government; as such, she abandons her child and boyfriend to carry out a bank robbery with a group of black racial supremacists.
Anderson clearly wants to romanticize these militants the way filmmakers Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola romanticized mobsters. The difference is that the mafia, for all its bloodshed, prioritized familial values. Here, Anderson’s ersatz heroes more closely resemble the 9/11 hijackers than Michael Corleone. Leftists have been yearning to do this for years, most recently eulogizing cop-killer Assata Shakur as a saintly activist.
If DiCaprio gives the film its heart, Sean Penn delivers its most indelible performance. As Col. Steven J. Lockjaw — a military officer charged with detaining and deporting illegal immigrants — Penn plays one of the most fascinating villains in recent memory. Captured early on by Perfidia’s socialist squad during a mass prison break, Lockjaw is at once repulsed and enthralled. He falls in love with her even as he pursues membership in the Christmas Adventurers’ Club, a cabal of cartoonishly racist elites bent on enforcing white homogeneity in America, an organization that seems ripped straight from the fever dreams of New York Times op-ed writers.
Driven by this internal tension between uncontrollable love and racist ambition, much of the film’s narrative follows Lockjaw and the U.S. military as they track down and dismantle Perfidia’s domestic terrorist group. That Anderson hopes to evoke sympathy for his socialist protagonists (who bomb power stations, courthouses, political offices, and military centers) suggests he’s courting the same audience that lionizes alleged killer Luigi Mangione. For the rest of us, he makes a strong case for reviving McCarthyism.
It is when Lockjaw kidnaps Ferguson’s daughter as a way of luring Perfidia that the plot finally gets moving, forcing the borderline vegetative stoner to scrape together whatever intellect he can cull from his fallow brain and set off to save her. Either by intent or in effect, Anderson makes a strong case for the nuclear family, as Ferguson repeatedly laments raising his daughter alone with lines such as, “I can’t do her hair; she needs her mom.”
Threaded throughout is a generational subplot. Ferguson’s cohort, who once laid the groundwork for radical activism, now find themselves displaced by younger, more self-consciously “woke” Sandinistas. When a fellow militant situates his location by “indigenous stolen lands,” Ferguson snaps, “Enough of this liberal bullshit.” Later, he fumes when his daughter explains a friend’s nonbinary pronouns. Whether these outbursts reflect Ferguson voicing his own vexations or Anderson slyly portraying him as a cranky boomer, the effect is the same: The film underscores the friction between old-guard radicals and their progressive successors.
For all its radical contortions, One Battle After Another is difficult to fault as cinema. Anderson, the brains behind such classics as Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), and There Will Be Blood (2007), remains a generational talent. At nearly three hours, the film somehow breezes by, propelled by taut pacing, an ensemble cast (Benicio Del Toro, as a martial arts sensei, provides the lone truly sympathetic character), and Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s pulsating score, which builds tension and sustains palpable dread. Shot for IMAX and 70mm, it is also a beautiful canvas, deserving of a theatrical experience.
Ultimately, Anderson has crafted a leftist parable disguised as an operatic rescue thriller. Yet beneath the ideology, what lingers is the image of a hapless father clawing to protect and rescue his daughter. And in that sense, the title is apt: Raising a family is, indeed, one battle after another.
Harry Khachatrian (@Harry1T6) is a film critic for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a software engineer, holds a master’s degree from the University of Toronto, and writes about wine at BetweenBottles.com.