My Cultural Diet

Bob Ferguson isn’t his real name. In a previous life, he was Pat Calhoun of the French 75, a far-left group intent on overthrowing the system. These days, however, he’s just a washed up stoner living off the grid with his 16-year-old daughter and trying to fly under the radar of Colonel Lockjaw, the fascist officer who ruined their family. Given that it’s a Paul Thomas Anderson film, One Battle After Another is a sprawling bit of everything: action, dark comedy, and pointed melodrama with a healthy dose of absurdism sprinkled on top. (Case in point, Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is so uptight, it looks like his spine is giving him a wedgie whenever he walks, and he’s desperate to ingratiate himself to a white supremacist group called — wait for it — the Christmas Adventurers Club.) But frankly, it’s too sprawling for its own good. It’s never not entertaining, especially when Leonardo DiCaprio gets manic as the ultra-paranoid ex-revolutionary desperate to protect his daughter, but the film gets lost amidst its own excess and tonal shifts. That said, the scenes of Lockjaw’s masked troops rounding up immigrants under dubious pretenses hit awfully close to home in light of ICE’s ongoing campaign of terror. And though some on the right claim that One Battle After Another is too sympathetic towards Antifa types, Anderson spends just as much time critiquing those who make ridiculous speeches and claim devotion to “the cause” but abandon and sell out their friends and families, not to mention their common sense and decency, to keep play-acting as revolutionaries sticking it to the Man.

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