‘One Battle After Another’ Review: Love, Politics and Violence Collide in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Latest Masterpiece

Few filmmakers are as unpredictable and generous as Paul Thomas Anderson. Nothing seems to tie him down to a particular kind of cinema, a subject, a style, or even a format. Nothing could be further from his world than a cinema as rigidly codified as Wes Anderson’s, or one bound to a single logic, tempo, or aesthetic repeated with only the slightest variations over time. He can make films that are sober or light, grave or gentle, severe or funny. He doesn’t appear bound to any single narrative formula or to characters that merely replay his obsessions. If there is one way to approach Anderson’s work it’s by considering how the history of a country collides with, reflects, contradicts, inspires, or twists the lives of its people.

Not always directly, but those changes are in the air, moving through his characters. One Battle After Another might be his most straightforward film to date in that regard. Inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland—a book that didn’t depict today’s world but captured something essential about American culture—, Anderson’s movie plunges into the notion of an eternal and ongoing clash between different ways of understanding and inhabiting a country.

Anderson approaches that “cultural battle” by emphasizing the first word: battle. The film is, more than anything, a constant fight, a chain of pursuits and confrontations that follow the manic logic of a video game (or a never-ending Road Runner cartoon). Spanning across years—whether yesterday, today, or tomorrow is deliberately unclear; time here feels like an eternal present—these battles pit visions of the world against each other, conflicts that have persisted for centuries under ever-changing names.

Above all, it’s an outrageous comedy. Unlike Inherent Vice, Anderson’s other Pynchon adaptation, this one never tips over into total absurdity. It always seems on the verge of collapsing into excess, veering into the gonzo chaos of Hunter S. Thompson—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas hovers as a reference point—but it never quite does. There’s an inner coherence that ties together the film’s whims in an inimitable way. Anderson seems to do whatever he wants—ridiculous action sequences, bizarre sex scenes, endless chases, over-the-top characters—but somehow it all fits together perfectly, like a costume designer throwing ten random garments on a model that inexplicably end up working in harmony.

One Battle After Another is an expression whose meaning extends far beyond the literal. On one level, narratively, it is exactly that: in the film, one conflict follows another almost without pause. On another level, it’s a centuries-long idea: a vision of the nation as an endless fight, something that never resolves, never exhausts itself, with no true winners or losers, just the need to begin again, over and over. It’s a perpetual spiral of violence, an aggressive confrontation—like that tense phone argument between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love that gets hilariously “quoted” here—that feels like it might never end.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a man who calls himself “Ghetto” Pat, a militant of the French 75, a revolutionary group that liberates migrants trapped at the border, targets anti-abortion politicians and racists, robs banks, and plunges entire cities into blackout. The group’s leader is Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by actress and singer Teyana Taylor), who is also Pat’s partner. She’s decisive and energetic; he’s more chaotic. Enter Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a brutal officer humiliated and duped by Perfidia, which sparks an obsessive fixation in him. More than stopping the group, what Lockjaw really wants is to possess her.

That tension fuels the rest of the film. The first part culminates in a twisted relationship-negotiation between Perfidia and Lockjaw that leaves her pregnant (by him? by Pat?) and the mother of a girl, Charlene. But when Pat decides it’s time to quit and live a quieter family life, Perfidia can’t give up “the struggle.” That, as you might guess, doesn’t end well. The film then leaps sixteen years forward (though exactly when is ambiguous—everything feels like a slightly dystopian present much like our own), with a calmer DiCaprio now calling himself Bob Ferguson, Charlene grown into a teenager named Willa (Chase Infiniti), and Lockjaw, even more aggressive and militarized, back on the hunt with motives as virulent as they are deranged. The uneasy calm of the intervening years shatters, and yet another violent chapter of this ongoing battle begins.

The film unfolds like a nonstop obstacle course. Lockjaw and his «employers»—a clandestine cabal of white nationalists with the ironically festive name Christmas Adventurers Club—are consumed by their racist obsession with destroying Perfidia and anyone who might inherit her fighting spirit. The French 75, in the “present” of the film, are a scattered group, communicating through strange codes and cryptic passwords. Still, most of them belong to ethnic or racial minorities—Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans—, precisely the people Lockjaw and his crew despise.

Benicio del Toro takes over a long stretch of the movie, in which a supposed search for Willa becomes the pretext for a military crackdown on Latinos, eerily similar to what we’ve seen in the U.S. under Donald Trump. This wasn’t in Pynchon, of course, and the script was likely finished before Trump’s second term, but Anderson foresaw that the veiled threats of the previous decade would harden into reality. In the world of One Battle After Another, the country is a police state obsessed with persecuting dissidents and minorities.

Yet the film doesn’t dwell on these issues as political debate—it stages them as a feverish action spectacle, one that sometimes takes on the tone of a family comedy about a father doing anything to protect his daughter. Bob, now an aging stoner with Big Lebowski vibes, has long since given up on revolution. He prefers to drink, get high, and watch The Battle of Algiers on TV. But he drops all of that the moment he realizes his daughter is in danger.

Curiously, it’s the film’s outlandishness that makes it feel most realistic. You only have to glance at the news—before heading into the theater I read that Trump had sent troops to Portland—to see that what plays like comic-book exaggeration in Anderson’s film is frighteningly close to the truth. We, Argentines, see the same every day with Javier Milei: a figure who seems plucked straight from an absurdist fiction.

That, I think, is the deeper meaning of One Battle After Another, the reason it works so well. The formal choices, the narrative surprises, the extraordinary use of music, the bursts of hilarity (DiCaprio’s escape during the Latino raid, complete with his fumbling to recall a password), the sheer creative freedom of Anderson’s direction—those are all remarkable. But what really matters is the way the film sees the world we live in today: absurd, dangerous, ridiculous, and faintly hopeful. Life is one battle after another, and it’s a fight we have to keep waging every day.