One Battle After Another: Teyana Taylor and Sean Penn
A relentless thrill-ride of chases, rescues, reversals, and standoffs wed to a politically provocative narrative about a family in crisis, Paul Thomas Anderson’s stellar One Battle After Another moves boldly in every way.
Loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland, the film makes heroes and martyrs of anti-government revolutionaries, and a raving mad villain of a border-patrolling military man.
When gun-toting members of the revolutionary outfit The French 75 “liberate” migrant detainees from a detention center at the U.S.-Mexico border, they earn a sinister and determined enemy in the center’s commander, Captain Steven J. Lockjaw.
Played by Sean Penn as a petty strongman whose weakness is written all over his face, Lockjaw couldn’t be more aptly named as the angry, bigoted pit bull who vows to hunt down the French 75. Penn’s blustery performance reigns as most flamboyant among the movie’s battle of bold turns, including Leonard DiCaprio’s endlessly amusing slacker revolutionary Bob.
Operating in character mode somewhere between the Dude and Jack Nicholson, DiCaprio creates a unique post-modern protagonist in Bob, consistently transmitting the electricity of being in the moment with him, be it dodgy or dangerous, or both.
A bumbling stoner bomber with the French 75, Bob has to go underground and raise his daughter on his own after an unplanned split from his even more extremist wife, Perfidia, played in one bold turn after another by the award-winning star of the indie drama A Thousand and One, Teyana Taylor.
Taylor’s livewire Perfidia is as raving mad and self-serving as Steven J. Lockjaw. She’s also a seemingly uncontainable spirit. Whatever her better qualities are, they appear to show up in her and Bob’s teenage daughter Willa, portrayed in an impressive big-screen debut by Chase Infiniti (Apple TV’s Presumed Innocent).
Willa doesn’t choose to be a revolutionary but is forced to take up a rifle when her parents’ actions finally catch up to them, and her. She’s dragged into a war with Lockjaw, which also pits the Black woman-led French 75 against an elite secret cabal of white supremacists.
One Battle After Another: Leonardo DiCaprio
The circuitous though absorbing plot is threaded between two astoundingly extensive stretches of nonstop action, suspended only briefly for good-humored bits of family time, and an almost peaceful sojourn to a ranch compound run by nuns.
Throughout, Anderson injects humor in unexpected places, like a running gag about Bob forgetting the required revolutionary code phrases, or a hilarious bit with Bob trying to keep up with much younger revolutionaries parkouring across city rooftops during a daring escape.
Even amidst the comedy, the pace doesn’t flag. In some sequences the film floats on air, propelled by the dynamic camerawork of cinematographer Michael Bauman, seamless editing by Andy Jurgensen, and entrancing score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, all three collaborators on Anderson’s previous film, Licorice Pizza.
The entire team’s technical prowess hits a dazzling peak in one soon-to-be-classic car chase featuring a Mustang Cobra pursuing a Dodge Charger over a hilly ribbon of desert highway that seems to undulate live onscreen. In another standout sequence, a French 75 bank robbery led by the delicately-named Junglepussy (Shayna McHayle) explodes into a crushing car chase through downtown L.A.
Every skirmish erupts into violent spectacle, yet the action stays grounded in our real-world battles over power and politics, over who is steering our American saga, and who even gets to be a part.
Underneath its guns a-blazing, over-the-top moxie, One Battle After Another conveys a sincerity behind its progressive spirit, expressed beautifully in the singularly serene performance of Regina Hall as true-blue French 75 warrior Deandra. In her, their cause pulses with meaning and urgency.
Benicio Del Toro’s karate instructor Sensei Sergio garners laughs with his unflappable composure amidst a chaotic confrontation between law enforcement and residents of a sanctuary city, but Sergio’s dedication to the cause likewise is no laughing matter.
You can drink and be merry and be cool like Sergio, but you still have to pick a side and fight when the world is in crisis. Arm yourself. Find your role. “Create a show,” as Perfidia urges bomber Bob. “This is a revolution.”
One Battle After Another (★★★★★) is Rated R, and is now playing in theaters nationwide. Visit www.fandango.com.
Ready for his closeup in the '90s-set action-comedy Caught Stealing, Austin Butler is framed staring directly into camera more than once, his soulful eyes a clear window into his ill-fated character Hank Thompson.
The film -- directed by Darren Aronofsky and written by Charlie Huston, based on his own 2004 novel -- makes smart use of Butler's cherubic face and strapping physicality to solidify Hank's cred as a former high school star baseball player, now a nice guy bartender in a dive bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side.
His girlfriend Yvonne, a saucy paramedic played by Zoë Kravitz, even delivers a whole speech about how nice a guy Hank is. The movie also captures its stars' off-the-charts chemistry, solidifying Hank and Yvonne's emotional bonds through the couple's genuine caring for one another and cute shared catchphrases.
True love curdling to bitter hatred has rarely hit harder or funnier onscreen than in Danny DeVito's ice-cold 1989 comedy The War of the Roses. Barbara and Oliver Rose, played by '80s screen team Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, start out adoring each other in the hit adaptation of Warren Adler's novel. So besotted (and aroused) are the well-matched pair, they can barely keep their hands, lips, and other parts to themselves.
By story's end, though, he's pissing on her fish dish in front of dinner guests, and she's driving her monster SUV over his vintage Morgan roadster with him inside it. He (accidentally) kills her cat. She fakes killing his dog and feeding it to him as pâté.
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