Everyman Bristol
I think this film may have had a point, and I think I may have missed it.
Which, come to that, is roughly what I said about Liquorice Pizza which was the last Paul Thomas Anderson movie I saw. That was the one in which several amiable youths went from scene to scene, not un-entertainingly, and I was left wondering if there was a point for the film to come to. I’ve also seen There Will Be Blood, which is similarly meandering but is positively begging to be compared with Charles Foster Kane and Michael Corleone. This one is based on a novel by Pynchon called Vinland. I believe Vinland was the Viking name for America. This piece of information doesn't help.
If someone asked me what One Battle After Another was about, I would of course resist the temptation to say “It was about three hours”. I would instead say that it is a serious / comic action movie; devolving in the second half into an extended chase; which kept forcibly making me think of Mad Max or even Thelma & Louise. America is of course big: really big so probably all films which aspire to be sprawling American myths have to involve a lot of car travel. Leonardo DiCaprio, for it is he, treads a thin line between heroic omni-competence and comedic ineptitude as he attempts to rescue his foster-daughter, who has for reasons we will come to, been kidnapped by a deranged ex-army officer. DiCaprio can do funny and swear a lot; the car chases and other scenes of action and violence are compelling and well done; and the story telling dragged me along with it even when I wasn’t quite sure where it was going. I spent probably the first thirty minutes thinking “who are all these people and why are they shouting at me” but once we got to the “sixteen years later” caption and it became about Pat (DeCaprio) and Charlene (Chase Infiniti) I let myself get carried along by what was going on.
OK: it is not simply an action movie. It clearly sets out to commit Satire, to the extent that the sorts of people who think that everything is woke think that it is one of the things which are woke. Pat and his partner Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) are hard core revolutionaries. When Perfidia is arrested after a bombing; a US officer, Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn) releases her in return for sex: Charlene is their daughter. Sixteen years on, Perfidia is either dead or in hiding; Pat is bringing up Charlene; and Lockjaw has joined a member of a ludicrous white supremacist cult called the Christmas Adventurers Club. He is deeply ashamed that he fathered a child with a black woman and wants to kill Charlene to secure his reputation as a bigot. There is a lot of comedic business about the far-right organisations rituals and loyalty oaths; and some parallel Kafkaesque manoeuvring around French 75, the left wing revolutionary cell. Sixteen years on, Pat can’t remember any of the secret code words, and his former comrades won’t help him until he quotes them, even thought they know perfectly well who he is.) It’s darkly humorous but I am not sure if there is a significant message behind it.
We are all agreed that “films” and “movies” are two different categories. This is unquestionably a movie, and considered as a hundred and eighty minutes of action, dialogue, and f-words which passes three hours without wasting it, I am happy to say that it is a darn good movie. But I keep hearing people saying that it is a cinema tick masterpiece that you experience rather than buy a ticket for etc etc etc which makes me feel that it must have had some deeper meaning I entirely failed to notice.
You could put that on the poster, if you like “The Kind of Film that Andrew Didn’t Notice The Deeper Meaning Of.”
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