One Battle After Another (2025) ****

 

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson is firmly established as a director who makes long movies. They tend to be good, but they are invariably well over two hours long, which serves as a barrier to watching them. It took me a while to get motivated to watch his latest, despite an Oscar nomination, but I'm glad I finally did.

Loosely based on the novel Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon, the film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Pat Calhoun, a washed-up, former revolutionary. Back in the day, Pat and his lover Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) did explosives work for an anti-fa-type group. When Perfidia gets caught, she sells out her comrades and abandons Pat with their baby girl. Years later, Pat is raising their now-teenager, smoking weed, and being paranoid that the government is coming for them. Turns out, he is right.

Paul Thomas Anderson is a master at 2 things: recruiting great talent and blending the dark with the humorous. Both skills are fully on display here. DiCaprio is in top form, and he has great chemistry with Teyana Taylor. Benicio del Toro is excellent in a small but critical role. Sean Penn, however, steals the movie as rogue ICE commander Steven J. Lockjaw. His obsessive border cop is a mix of Captain Ahab and General Jack D. Ripper, from “Dr. Strangelove.”

Anderson manages to maintain a perfect mix of drama and comedy through this 2 hour 41 minute film. “One Battle After Another” deals with domestic terrorism, murderous government agents, brutal immigration crackdowns, and racist secret societies. He leavens the film with just enough absurdity to lighten the mood while keeping us in the narrative. Of course, the film contains some completely fantastical elements. ICE agents would never just execute people in the streets, and the U.S. government would never turn American cities into war zones just to arrest a few illegal aliens. Would they?

4 stars out of 5