Glory be, I really liked and admired Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another. It’s enthralling, it’s hard-hitting, it’s up-to-the-minute in its topicality, it’s drawing on and doing full justice to a multitude of genres including action, comedy, suspense, and the political thriller — plus it’s got a mesmerizing, undulating, hill-and-valley climactic car-chase scene like nothing I’ve seen before, and I’ve seen ten thousand car-chase scenes in my time.
Overall, One Battle After Another is the complete package of filmgoing delights. It’s everything movies made in the United States should be right now.
And this film is brought to you by Paul Thomas Anderson, the high-culture auteur responsible for such portentous works as There Will Be Blood and The Master. Here, he’s loosely adapted and updated Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, which is about 1960s radicals under fresh attack in the Ronald Reagan era, on the run once again from federal forces in an ever more insane right-wing environment.
One Battle After Another arrives in theaters only a few weeks after I was charmed by Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, another example of a generally snooty director going for genre movie pleasures and coming up with something rough-edged and delightful. If this is a trend, it’s an unlikely and marvelous one, and I hope to see it continue until zany, freewheeling Michael Haneke screwball comedies are enchanting us all at the multiplex.
If there’s any justice — which is sometimes doubtful — One Battle After Another ought to win an Academy Award in nearly every feature film category. Cinematographer Michael Bauman’s rich, raw imagery, achieved by shooting in the old format VistaVision, like Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, is certain to be nominated. And surely Leonardo DiCaprio must triumph as Best Actor, because he’s simply outdone himself here. Who else could play the agonies of single-parenting a…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
