One Battle After Another

The first thing one might remark seeing bizarre cast of revolutionaries and their right wing counter-revolutionary counterparts in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is how familiar they seem. The Battle of Algiers has a cameo but this is a new form, surreal cinema vérité. "Ghetto" Pat Calhoun (Leonardo Di Caprio) and "Jungle Pussy" (Shayana McHale) are part of French 75. "Colonel Lockjaw" (Sean Penn) is "reverse raped" by "Perfidia Beverly Hills" (Teyana Taylor). Then there is The Christmas Club, a proto Project 2025, composed of Steven Miller, Russell Voigt  Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon type characters. All of this may recall Dr. Strangelove, with "Jack D. Ripper" (Sterling Hayden), "Major King Kong" (Slim Pickens) and Peter Sellers in the title role. The movie navigates a fine line between drama and parody and is also inadvertently a parody of itself. Sean Penn will undoubtedly receive an Academy Award nomination for his tour de force performance. Similar to Strangelove, One Battle After Another, which is based on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, is a tone poem as it switches from bizarre cartoons to photojournalistic realities. The cages in the migrant detention camps and the rioting in the streets are  all newsworthy. The director's brilliance lies in his enduring ability, in The Master, Phantom Thread and this current release, to create worlds that are and are not of this world.

read "Enjambment of Fallen Men" by Francis Levy, The East Hampton Star