I haven’t seen every contender, but One Battle After Another is a strong candidate for best mainstream American picture of 2025. Released theatrically late in the year, it’s now available streaming on HBO Max, which is where I caught it.
Basic lineaments are these. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, from the novel Vineland by – get this – Thomas Pynchon. (You might think, reasonably, that Pynchon was impossible to adapt, but no; Anderson already took a shot at it with Inherent Vice, ten or so years ago, and there was apparently a stage production of V., in Berlin, running a little under four hours, and which seems to me a hugely quixotic undertaking.) The proof, however, is in the pudding, and One Battle After Another, quirky though it may be, is a very satisfying thriller. I feel it has a couple of blind spots, and I’ll get to that, but it sets up fast, and doesn’t slow down, and pays off big.
Leo DiCaprio, for those of you who still think he’s too cute for school – even after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – shows off some terrific chops, very understated. Sean Penn, anything but understated, goes even more batshit than you could possibly imagine, as the heavy, and yet manages to convince you the guy isn’t a cartoon. Benicio Del Toro brings some lucid and calming energy to the scene, as a sensei. And the two female leads don’t play it safe, Teyana Taylor, as the radical mom, and Regina Hall, as her bred-to-revolution daughter – both heart-breakers, in their own way, and not always sympathetic.
The plot takes some sudden turns, and I won’t spoil it, but the story is pretty straightforward. A left-wing domestic resistance group, working to spring illegals from custody and move them through an Underground Railroad to safety, is compromised. They break up and go off the radar. ICE, in the person of the aforementioned Sean Penn, tracks them down, over the years, going for kill or capture. Leo, in a state of hallucinatory bliss, imagines he and his daughter are safe, but the devil comes to their door. Much grievous mayhem ensues.
You’ll have to take my word for it, it’s nowhere near as formulaic as this may make it sound. It hits a lot of the tropes you’d expect, but pulls some real surprises. It’s consistently entertaining, and still remains thoughtful.
Here’s the thing I’m not quite sure about.
There are, historically, left-wing groups that have turned to terror, just as there are similar right-wing organizations. The people in the movie might remind you of Edward Abbey’s Monkey-Wrench Gang, in that their intentions are good, but they’ve embraced violence, and like so many others, Left or Right, they think their cause excuses that. There is, of course, no organized AntiFa, not even an umbrella. We might remember, though, that in those damned and debated 1960’s and 1970’s, some of the more radical terror groups did in fact make common cause, the IRA Provos and the Japanese Red Army, the Weather Underground and the Panthers. Not a fever dream of J. Edgar Hoover’s, an actual alliance. Maybe it came to nothing, in the end, out of mistrust, but it was in the collective unconscious.
Their opposite number is the Great Right-Wing Conspiracy.
It features in a lot of over-heated paranoia movies, but is it a real thing? We know they’ve always had a fear of the anarchist Left, going back to the Haymarket, or Sacco and Vanzetti, but in those cases, the power of the state was mobilized. We’re talking about private money, working in the shadows. Sure, they meet behind closed doors, and wield enormous influence, but do they use secret Masonic recognition signals and practice barbaric rituals? Well, the Ku Klux Klan did, but I don’t think these guys have to. The big-money tech oligarchs are right out in the open. They’re not shy about swinging their weight around. That’s the only convention One Battle After Another uses that I’m not convinced of. I don’t think the right wing has to work in secret, or show each other their Capt. Midnight decoder rings. They recognize each other on sight, known predators stalking in the tall grass.
So, a reservation.
I guess you could say it was dramatic convenience. For sure, Thomas Pynchon has long trafficked in weird, all-powerful secret societies – and they seem, unhappily, all too authentic. I think, too, they’ve always been around: think the Jesuits. In other words, it’s an understandable temptation, and neo-Nazis and Aryan Nation supremacists are very definitely crawling around, not even in the underbrush. I wouldn’t argue that these people aren’t wicked, and capable of terrible cruelties, and they probably sit around their clubs with brandy and cigars, and gloat. They just don’t hide it.
