Fortunately, I should note several paragraphs deep, everything so far described is the prologue. The title card for this nearly three-hour movie hasn’t even dropped, nor the real story begun. Nevertheless, much of the table-setting consists of some of Anderson’s tensest and kinkiest flourishes where an encounter between Perfidia and Lockjaw leads to late night rendezvouses in hotels and later regrets. People are messy, but how they confront that mess, and live with it, cannot be overlooked or diminished. And after Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl who could be either man’s progeny—and yet most definitely is Pat’s daughter—the real tools come to bear. Lockjaw rains scorched earth down on Perfidia and her French 75 revolutionary group. In the fallout, Pat loses everything, changes his name to Bob, and daughter Charlene’s to Willa. Sixteen years later, they’re still living by these aliases, with teenage Willa (Chase Infiniti) being none the wiser… until Lockjaw comes calling again.
According to Anderson, One Battle After Another was originally born from his dream of making a “chase movie.” That narrative is there, but in function it is closer to the grand lyricism, and seedy evil, of something like Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter as opposed to Mad Max or The Fugitive. Like Robert Mitchum singing “Leaning” while stalking his stepchildren in Hunter, One Battle pivots on an all-time sinister big screen villain—Penn is indeed a personification of white American hegemony and hypocrisy in one of the best turns of his career—pursuing his shame across the American West. However, the film is about more than sudden unexpected swerves into white-knuckle tension. The movie cartwheels, in fact, between various tones, vibes, and aesthetics, like a child who remains incredulously dry while skidding through puddles.
There has never been a PTA picture as plot-driven as One Battle After Another, which in a nutshell is the story of DiCaprio’s middle-aged dad trying to find his daughter after she’s gone to ground. He’s also facing the the ticking clock presented by Penn’s pharisee in camouflage fatigues. But from the bone-deep exhaustion scrawled across DiCaprio’s brow, and the carnage that decades of cheeba have written there, the movie still finds time to say so much more. With its massive and faintly indulgent length, One Battle finds just as much space to be a hang-out movie about a washout radical 20 years after his underground burrow got boarded up.
One of the best bits in the picture is a running gag about DiCaprio being unable to get assistance from his former comrade-in-arms because poor Bob’s weed-addled brain has turned to mush. Nearly 20 years later, he absolutely cannot remember the password games French 75 call centers still use like they’re in a Sean Connery Bond flick. But that means no help will be forthcoming, and DiCaprio’s rising fury and exasperation becomes a Vaudevillian wordplay comedy.
As one of the last contemporary Gen-X legends DiCaprio has yet to collaborate alongside, Anderson appears to savor finally working with DiCaprio. Still the director subverts expectations, revealing that he is far more interested in tapping into DiCaprio’s underutilized talent for inhabiting dimwits with slow-roiling rage. It’s a wryly funny turn, even as the film empathizes greatly with his life-or-death plight. He might be a father out to save his daughter, but the movie doesn’t truly belong to him.
The real heart of the film, and the emotional counterweight to the narrative’s heinous villain, turns out to really be newcomer Infiniti as Willa. More than just a young actor who can hold her own in scenes opposite DiCaprio and Penn, Infiniti embodies Anderson’s most earnest intentions. She and the film insist that hope and aspirations for a better future are not simply affectations, or a persona you can don and discard like the all-American squareness Lockjaw pretends to swear by when in the company of fellow white masters of the universe. In this way, Willa is not just the film’s MacGuffin when she’s sprinting across desert landscapes in 70mm as military vehicles rush up behind her; she is also our heir apparent, doomed to inherit decades of our culture war baggage and bullshit.
