Paul Thomas Anderson’s controversial film ‚One Battle After Another‘ opens amid political tensions, featuring themes of violence that critics find troubling.
Timing, they say, is everything, and it is not director Paul Thomas Anderson’s fault that his latest film, „One Battle After Another“, is opening after the worst two weeks of American left-wing political violence in decades. But it sure makes it hard to watch.
Imagine a movie about World War II in which you are meant to be cheering for lovable Nazis.
The film is an adaptation of the 1990s novel „Vineland“, and it turns out making Thomas Pynchon novels into movies is a bit like translating James Joyce’s „Ulysses“ into Chinese. You can do it, but you miss a lot.
What is missing here is even the slightest bit of nuance about the glorious necessity to kill people, including innocents, in order to topple Anderson’s weird and paranoid version of the American government.
At the top, Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson, or Rocketman character, is in a star-crossed love affair with Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. When they aren’t blowing up immigration detention facilities—yes, you read that right—they find time to create a daughter.
Things go south when Perfidia murders an unarmed guard in cold blood during a bank heist while her partner yells about Black Power. The killing disrupts their little family and sends Bob and daughter Willa into hiding as Perfidia runs off, presumably to Cuba.
The rest of the movie is spent with Sean Penn’s racist and sexually strange Army Col.
