What may be the best film of 2025 is, undoubtedly, the most important film of a very long time.
It is… all at the same time… concise, obscure, funny, terrifying, accurate, necessary, and fanciful. I could go on. The movie certainly does… for just under three hours.
I refer you to Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and I hardly know where to start. Let me begin in the summer of 1955, immediately after my graduation from High School.
It was June and there was a review in TIME magazine of the film The Night of the Hunter where the reviewer wrote something to the effect that the movie was “a bit like using a .45 to kill a ladybug. One admires the marksmanship but deplores the waste of power.”
I have remembered that quote since reading it over 70 years ago, have referred to it more than once regarding any number of movies, and thought of it again when watching One Battle After Another. I thought of it… but quickly realized it really does not apply to this powerful and, potentially, important film.
“Potentially,” in that we have yet to see what the film audience will do with what they see at the nation’s movie theatres and streaming on Netflix. Will it awaken the imagination of the viewing audience? Cynically, I suspect that the potential of this film and its message will be wasted. The movie’s dismal failure at the box office is a strong indicator that I am right about that.
For purposes of this review, I shall put aside the politics of this motion picture. I believe it was Samuel Goldwyn who, nearly a hundred years ago, said something to the effect that “…messages are for Western Union.” Ironic in that his grandson (Anthony Howard “Tony” Goldwyn) plays a powerful white supremacist in the movie whose significant role is all about “message.”
Onward. The movie is long… very long at 162 minutes. It does not matter. The time flies by. The performances are all … even the tiniest parts… visually and virtually terrific.
In no particular order, Chase Infiniti makes an amazing debut as the daughter of Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor, both of whom shine as Ms. Infiniti’s parents. I have never before seen a Latin American sensei… nor can I imagine anyone better at playing such a part than Benicio del Toro does in this film. Regina Hall is powerful in her role, and Sean Penn, as US Army Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, is assured an Oscar nomination for his performance in this motion picture. There are so many others… and director Anderson has herein proven the point that there are no small roles… as each of the actors in this movie play their parts beautifully and believably.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay for One Battle After Another, partially based on the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and with a nod to the French film classic Battle of Algiers.
Anderson is a genius filmmaker and unlike the movie, Jay Kelly, which I had to watch twice because I could not believe it could possibly be as boring as it was on the first viewing, I will watch One Battle After Another at least one more time to understand it better and in appreciation for my favorite art form being realized so well.
There is no minimizing the restraint this observer exerted in this review by minimizing the content of this motion picture. It is a very political movie and its truths might sting, yet they are valid. As someone who often categorizes himself as a political animal, I felt it better to exercise restraint and to deal with other aspects of the movie with only a reference or two as to what the whole thing is really about.
One Battle After Another is about revolution. The film begins in Reagan’s 1984 America and ends in the present day. It refers constantly to racism in today’s America… those who experience it by being born something other than white, and those who will do whatever necessary to … at the very least… freeze the country in place with the hope of a regression into a whiter, more Christian country than the one we now have.
One Battle After Another is scary, in that it could provide a handbook… or, at least, a reminder of what oppressed people ought to do. It is equally frightening to see what little was accomplished in those battles of the past and what has/ or more properly, has not happened for those advocates of change.
Director Anderson went out of his way not to mention any current politicians, political parties, or movements on either the left or the right. Still, it is an all-too-real depiction of what, at the very least, we are flirting with in modern day America.
“Be careful,” the aging revolutionary Leonardo DiCaprio says at the end of the movie to his 16-year-old daughter as she is about to go out into the world.
Meant to bring a smile of recognition to the filmgoer and a reminder of the understanding that the battle goes on, is her reassuring response:
“I won’t.”
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