Sometimes, it takes the creative impetus of a great filmmaker to finally pick up that chunky novel that’s been sitting gathering dust on your book shelves since god-knows-when. Such was the case with my own yellowing edition of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, ‘Vineland’, which I’d shirked for too long having understood it to be, from contemporary reviews, one of the author’s more opaque works (which is saying something). When it was announced that Paul Thomas Anderson was returning once more to the PCU (Pynchon Cinematic Universe) following 2014’s superb Inherent Vice by adapting ‘Vineland’ for the screen, this was the sign I needed to finally dive in.
For me, the book has some insanely high highs, but its concentric structure and a logic-bothering tendency towards nesting digressions led me to wonder how any mortal – let alone the great Paul Thomas Anderson – could transpose this nine-sided ratfuck of an epic into the visual medium. Perhaps the most delightful surprise of his new work, One Battle After Another, is that in spirit, it is a perfect adaptation of the novel without having very many of the same characters, shifting its timeframe to the present day, and slicing away a good half of the page count for necessary brevity. A good literary adaptation is not a case of scooping out the dialogue and filming the action on every page for maximum fidelity and fan service – it’s about ingesting the themes and purpose of a novel and trying as best you can to honour the intentions of the author.
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Despite the fact that this is a PTA film with car chases, shootouts, military executions, bank robberies and city-wide sieges, it is also one of the filmmaker’s more melancholy works, a film about characters who have allowed time to slip away from them and have abandoned the youthful ideals that, at one time, gave a vital spritz to life. It’s a study of what happens after the revolution, when you sense that the action you’ve taken has led to superficial change, but it starts to slowly fade out as the dismal status quo wafts back like a bad smell.
Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio, having a great time) is a wild-eyed explosives expert and a stringer for the leftwing militant group, The French 75. He seems to get a party-like kick out of his work, which is sometimes a diversionary tactic, such as setting off fireworks, but also involves planting bombs in office buildings to create leverage for the group’s demands, which are never made clear but definitely involve preventing the oppression of immigrants in the US, which is always timely, but even more so in the current moment.
De-facto leader of the gang is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), an athletic and almost psychotically-driven femme fatale who’s extremely morally comfortable when it comes to administering violence towards those she feels deserve it. Her and Bob definitely have a little touchy-feely thing going, though it seems he is more invested than she is. On the first big sortie, in which the group tear down a roadside immigrant encampment, Perfidia encounters and sexually humiliates Colonel Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn, looking like Erich von Stroheim without the monocle), a latent white supremacist whose separatist yearnings are not enough to suppress the fact that he really digs the game that Perfidia is playing. And so a love triangle is born. And eventually, so is a child – Chase Infiniti’s Willa, brought up by Bob when Perfidia is forced (by Steve) into a very tight ethical corner.
Anderson manages to build this context out at breakneck pace in the film’s dazzling opening chapter, a masterpiece of expressive montage that never once talks down to the intelligence of the audience to read and understand the torrent of images it delivers. Its second chapter takes place years later when Bob (now a druggy burnout) and the industrious Willa are living off-grid in the township of Baktan Cross, a locale with a mostly latino population. There, they are able to bask in the Zen-like circumspection of a local dojo owner referred to exclusively as “Sensei” (an insanely cool Benicio Del Toro, could be an all-timer from him) who ends up becoming something of a guardian angel, especially when it transpires that Steve Lockjaw is back on Bob’s scent.
One Battle After Another looks like an expensive film, though we don’t make that observation in the pejorative. Every damn nickel and dime has been thrown up on that screen, through its lovingly fastidious production design, the use of visually arresting and meaningful public spaces for its locations, the costumes, props and cars whose every colour pops, especially when captured on 70mm VistaVision film stock. Sure, DiCaprio is the box office ace up its sleeve, but there is so much of a thrill to be had simply from marinating in the craft of this thing, to allow yourself to be enveloped in the fluid editing, the AM Radio musical selections, and even to wonder how some parts of it were even built. There’s a car chase scene in the film’s final act which, visually, looks like nothing else you’ve ever seen before – it’s very wild and very weird.
Yet while One Battle After Another is a film that is built from many extraordinary constituent parts (Jonny Greenwood’s score another blinder), it’s how all these elements work in concert that really makes it sing as a motion picture. In its cocky dynamism and the manic energy of the performances and camera work, it’s hard not to hark back to early PTA bedrocks such as Boogie Nights and Magnolia. And yet this is maybe a case of things coming full circle, as the confident looseness and natural rhythms of a film like Licorice Pizza (which itself has touch of the Pynchons about it) are also present here in some of the film’s little interludes and fascinating cultural touchpoints.
So sorry to not be able to offer anything a little more surprising in this write-up, but this is another slam-dunk for Anderson, who has made a film that is a very rare beast indeed: one that is incredibly fun without ever once straining to be. And if you’re reading these words, it’s your god-given duty to go see this in a cinema on the biggest, loudest screen you’re able to access. Not just as a guaranteed hit of pleasure, but to make sure that whoever’s financially enabling Anderson to make his wonderful works has reason to keep doing so long into the future. If it’s a hit, best pick up that copy of ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ right now.