When Peter Bradshaw’s film of the week in The Guardian (London) gets a five star review and David Fears in Rolling Stone (New York) describes it as
a parable about fathers and daughters, a conspiracy thriller for the ICE age, an ensemble comedy that encourages all-stars to get their best eccentricity on, the single greatest film of 2025
One Battle After Another might be a Hollywood film worth seeing. It is. At least twice.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson has a back catalogue of Hollywood art-hits that sets movie moguls drooling. His oil baron epic, There will be Blood, starring Daniel Day Lewis, was listed as ‘the greatest film of of the 21st Century’ by New York Times critics.
Is Anderson ‘the thinking person’s Quentin Tarrantino’?
That auteur’s drive is seen in the opening scenes of One Battle After Another, when an underground revolutionary grouping, French 75, led by African American women, releases detainees from a holding centre, while pulverising it. We meet two of the film’s protagonists: Perfidia Beverly Hills, (Teyana Taylor) and "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun / Bob Ferguson, (Leonardo Di Caprio). They exist in a highly sexualised world, charged with the power of her political energies and the explosive materials he uses. Their inter-racial relationship thrives on sex, war and revolution. It is heady stuff, and just about holds together as an extended prologue, to the gear change that shifts time forward 16 years, when a product of their union is introduced.
We meet Willa Ferguson/Charlene Calhoun (Chase Inifiniti) at a martial arts session with her sensei Sergio St. Carlos, (Benficio del Toro). He is a Karate teacher and a leader of the off-grid community in Baktan Cross, where ‘wet backs’, immigrants from across the border south of California, find scantuary.
This scene uses the Steely Dan song Dirty Work (from Can’t Buy a Cheap Thrill, 1975) in what one commentator described as ‘the greatest needle drop in cinema today’. Watching and listening to it, the viewer realises that once again Paul Tomas Anderson has drawn from his childhood in Hollywood to put a film experience in front of us that could only come from that cinema-saturated part of the world.
Introducing us to Willa Ferguson re-introduces us to another of the film’s heavy-weight protagonists: Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a military officer hot on the case of the French 75, and most particularly, on the case of Perfidia Beverly Hills. Lockjaw’s obsession with Hills, a not entirely convincing relationship, opens the thread of the story that lampoons far-right ideology and groupings, in particular its fear of miscegenation.
The film’s good guys are leftist radicals, acting against authoritarian elements within the US government. Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) live under assumed names in Baktan Cross, as French 75 goes further underground, with informers penetrating its membership. Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) hunts the group down.
The scenes of the group attacking an immigrant detention centre feel current, rather than historic. Time is eliding over itself and everything is happening now, as it can in the best dramatic work. We are in screen time/stage time/now, with Time’s Arrow perpetually moving forward. The characters age and grow frail (Bob) or feisty (Willa). He becomes a protective, if inept, Dad. She becomes a woman, re-working the energy of her mother. The world changes and la lucha continua (the struggle continues).
Anderson doesn’t offer a handbook for the most effective form of rebellion. He presents Bob’s efforts to reconcile his youthful idealism with his middle-aged caution. Willa embodies the paradox of the future Bob fought for, a simultaneous win and loss, whose responsibility eventually passes to Willa herself. There will be young people fighting fascism, however they can. Anderson offers a moderate, incremental-change vision of political upheaval, along with the admission that things could get much worse. There is no utopia or celebration of political violence by state or anti-state forces. There is simply the endeavour by individuals to band together, to protect themselves from the violence of poverty and oppression, finding hope and love in their young, even as they age.
They live the necessary indulgence of hoping the fight isn’t over.
La Lucha Continua. Ahora. Siempre.
When Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) is loaded into a refuge incinerator by two figures in white hazmat suits, we know the dirty work continues.
I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah
I don't wanna do your dirty work no more
I'm a fool to do your dirty work, oh yeah
One Battle After Another – recommended? Highly.
One Battle After Another; film; Paul Tomas Anderson; Ghoulardi Film Company; USA; 2025
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