Other than a rousing raunchy performance by Sean Penn as a power-revved pervert, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another left me , battle-fatigued, underwhelmed. It is a good film, clogged with an irresistible visual and verbal you-chew-my-line-I-chew-yours vitality. But beyond that, the pulverised plot falls short of the greatness that is being attributed to the film.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays Pat Calhoun, a member of a defunct revolutionary group named French 75(?!) who wants to lead a quiet peaceful life with his lovely 17-year old daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). But the Establishment wouldn’t let him.
That’s it! This is the plot, though it looks far more dense, tense and intense, there is nothing more to it. For all we care Pat (with his multitudinous aliases, many borrowed from musical bands of the 1970s) could have been a bank robber trying to leave his violent past behind heal and rehabilitate with his daughter. In brief, a Schwarzenegger film with political overtones.
The “revolutionary” thrusts in the plot are eyewash-level anti-Trumpisms, hurling abusive statements against the American anti-migration laws.
In Paul Thomas Anderson’s vainglorious vision, there is room for all colours and cultures, though the focus of the writer-director’s overweening satirical romp is Mexico. There is this lengthy mono-look at an undercover Mexican shelter run by a sufi-like martial arts teacher Sergio, played by the brilliant Benicio del Toro.
The entire coverage of this episode where acute danger is alchemized into cute game-playing , didn’t work for me. We can’t whittle down racist hunting to a joke and expect the humour to wash away all the toxicity.
There is this ongoing joke about DiCaprio forgetting the password on the phone that accesses his special privileges as a former revolutionary. Watching the tiring joke I was reminded of the recent Malayalam film Eko in which a character describes how his Maoist parents were blown into smithereens.
Death, particularly of the outlaw, is not funny. For this film and its terrific cast, it is.
Amen to that. What caught my attention in One Battle After Another was how the action tumbles out in a ferocious fusion of farce and fear with the funny lines finally overcoming the danger. It’s like watching a reality show where you know no one is going to be harmed, or at least hopefully not.
Then there is Sean Penn, so twisted so perverse and yet not too sinister as an American army officer who is hoodwinked by a Black revolutionary woman and must have his revenge.
The problem is, they wouldn’t let him. Not in a film as wildly subversive as this.
