Briefly Reviewed – Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another’

The film is flat-out fantastic. I won’t lie that it’s PTA’s masterpiece. That evaluation will depend on taste, and for me his masterpieces are The Master, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood. In those films, we get emotion, and event, and character development, and the eccentricity we expect from an auteur. But after a long-ish prologue that sets up the political stakes, One Battle After Another becomes a pure genre-thriller: it could be called One Chase After Another. But what chases they are, and what set pieces! I was practically weeping with gratitude for the pure cinematic pleasure on display. The performances are marvellous (except the usually reliable Sean Penn, who becomes a bit of a caricature). But this – ultimately – is a movie that belongs to the director, the editor, the cinematographer. The way time is “used” in the stretch where the Leonardo DiCaprio character attempts an escape is on par with the stretch in Magnolia where time ticks away as the little-boy game contestant has to pee. There’s that cliché that a filmmaker is working at “the peak of his powers”. This is that.

The ending is political, with the torch of protest being passed on to a new generation. And we do get a shot of the DiCaprio character watching The Battle of Algiers. And there is a ton of allusion to present-day America. But One Battle After Another is more along the lines of the great paranoia thrillers from the 1970s, like The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, where the screenplay dotted its i’s and crossed its t’s with the politics of the time, but used that background to present a “Hollywood entertainer”. PTA remains one of the few filmmakers in the world who wears the “written and directed by” credit with pride. With others who attempt both, a sense of fatigue seems to set in after a point – but PTA derives his material from such diverse sources that there’s no visible sign of exhaustion. He only seems to be adding to his arsenal of skills. The trippy humour here is something we have not seen much of in his work. Oh, and Jonny Greenwood’s music! It’s a textbook example of how to score a movie without overwhelming it. Bravos all around.