Film review: One Battle after Another

Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

 

When I went to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie at the theatre, One Battle after Another, the person taking tickets asked if I could think of a one-word alternate title for the movie I was going to see. I wasn’t able to think of anything, so he replied, “Life.”

 

And for anyone alive today in late 2025 I think that might resonate – whether you’re involved in the climate justice movement, the Free Palestine movement, the struggle against privatization of healthcare and all other public services, the many fights to defend Indigenous sovereignty and against the encroachment of fossil fuel corporations taking over Indigenous land to poison the planet and make more profits – it is indeed one battle after another.

 

The new film by PTA is a cinematic battle cry that honours past struggles and insists that they are very connected to our dystopian present. At the same time, it’s also a movie that is a lot of fun. This is exhilarating movie-making that makes the two hours forty-one minute running time go by in a flash.

 

And for a movie whose main character is a pot-head and a beer drinker, who spends most of his time on his couch in a red plaid bathrobe watching revolutionary movies like The Battle of Algiers and mouthing the words, the movie is a whirling dervish of an adventure, both outrageous and deadly serious.

 

One Battle After Another follows the trajectory of Bob Ferguson – Leonardo DiCaprio at his buffoonish best – once a member of a revolutionary organization called the French 75. Set largely in the present, the movie begins 16 years earlier when Bob and his comrades are engaging in revolutionary resistance, which includes liberating mostly Latinx and Black people in a detention centre, who are incarcerated behind barbed wire and guarded by US military – no doubt the precursors to today’s ICE agents, spiriting away migrants to foreign jails where they may never be heard from again.

 

Bob (whose name is Pat during his revolutionary period) is part of an underground movement that is more reminiscent of the 60s than the mid 2000s, which is when their revolutionary activity supposedly takes place. Pat is involved in a relationship with Black revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills. They are part of a network of activists, many of whom are Black or brown, and who engage in bank robberies, setting off bombs and helping desperate people cross the border into the US, trying to keeping them safe from the police and the military.

 

At some point during this activity the group, and particularly Perfidia, come to the attention of Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw—aptly named and perfectly played by Sean Penn. Lockjaw is attracted by Perfidia, in spite of a deep-seated racism, and the upshot is that they have sex. This will come back to haunt Pat and his sixteen year old daughter when they are in hiding years later, living undercover as Bob and Wilma Ferguson in northern California. Lockjaw, who wants to be admitted to a select group of old, white, far right politicians and power brokers called the Christmas Adventurers Club, is scared that his past may come back to haunt him, in the form of a sixteen year old Black daughter.

 

Perfidia, much more of a serious revolutionary than Bob, who is a bit of a bumbler, is eventually captured by the police during their revolutionary stint, informs on her comrades and escapes across the border to Mexico, which is how Bob and their daughter wind up living under the radar sixteen years later, until Lockjaw uses his military command to hunt them down and thus eliminate his problem.

 

Wilma escapes with one of the former members of the French 75 from a high school dance where Lockjaw’s troops have tracked her down. Bob, in the meantime, runs to Wilma’s sensei and part-time defender of immigrants, illegal or otherwise – the inimitable and unflappable Sergio St. Carlos to help him escape Lockjaw and find his daughter. The martial arts instructor is beautifully played by Benicio del Toro, wearing a headband and track suit throughout, who explains to Bob that he’s run into a ‘Harriet Tubman-type situation’. 

 

One of the funniest scenes in the movie shows the two on the lam as Sergio tries to convince Bob that to be free he will have to find his inner ‘Tom Cruise’ and leap from a moving car. 

 

There are many striking scenes throughout One Battle after Another, including Lockjaw’s surreal visit to the members of the Christmas Adventurers Club, complete with blaring holiday music, Wilma’s enforced sanctuary with a group of revolutionary nuns and the final chase scene through the beautiful hills of the California desert.

 

It’s true that the politics of the revolutionaries remain hazy and somewhat caricatured, not surprising in a movie that was inspired by a Thomas Pynchon novel. But what the movie does get right is the spirit of rebellion and love that motivates the revolutionaries, including even the hapless Bob.

 

Just shortly before this movie was released Assata Shakur (originally Joanne Deborah Byron born in Queens, New York), a Black revolutionary who inspired generations of activists to struggle for a better world, passed away in Havana, Cuba, where she had lived in exile from the US for over four decades. In Anderson’s film the character of Perfidia has some of the revolutionary fervour of Shakur, who wrote in her autobiography, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

 

If we look at the current situation in the United States, where Black and brown people are being routinely rounded up by the thugs of ICE, where freedoms are threatened daily by an authoritarian regime that has a lot in common with the Christmas Adventurers Club Anderson portrays in his film, we can only agree with Bob’s daughter Wilma when she answers the call to come to the streets and defend migrants, in spite or because of the history of her parents’ involvement years earlier. When Bob asks if she will be ‘careful’ she replies with all bravery and love, ‘No’.