In large part, One Battle After Another uses Pynchon as a springboard for an updated story that seems to sync with contemporary concerns about a badly fractured society that spins out one dizzying scenario after another.
Wild and scattered, One Battle After Another takes a big dare. It's like a dinner brimming with side dishes and no main course. Don't take that as a failure but as an overriding observation about the incoherence of a time without a clear center.
A sprawling canvas allows Anderson to introduce a range of characters, some bordering on caricature. Looking like he's shedding the last vestiges of youth, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob Ferguson, a rebel who -- in his younger days -- blew up buildings in cahoots with Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a Black woman and bold provocateur who finds sexual kick in armed defiance. Wielding power turns her on.
The revolutionaries -- dubbed French 75 -- rob banks and free captured immigrants, saving them from internment, deportation, or worse. In one scene, Black women rob a bank, stamping bold fury onto the screen.
The insurrectionists are opposed by a militaristic government police force in which Sean Penn's Colonel Lockjaw serves as a chief field officer. Lockjaw's sexual desires push him into racist hypocrisy when he's aroused by Perfidia. His ramrod walk -- a rigid rooster's strut -- makes for an ongoing sight gag.
The opening scenes offer an unsettling blur of incident without much context. Anderson leaves it to us to ride the roiling wave he creates. The characters will become more defined when the film leaps ahead 16 years. Still active, the revolution seems to be sputtering.
Time remains fuzzy throughout. Characters use cell phones, but pay phones still can be found in the story's dystopian surroundings.
After her fierce opening salvo, Perfidia disappears from the story; we learn that she was captured and saved herself by turning rat. She entered the Witness Protection Program but escaped. She hasn't been seen since. For his part, Bob has retreated to a remote rural area where he's raising Willa (Chase Infiniti), the assertive high-school-aged daughter he had with Perfidia.
Bob lives in a marijuana-induced haze, but his paranoia seems reasonable; the military would like to find him. I won't say more about it, but doubts are raised about Willa's parenthood.
To the extent that there's a plot, it kicks into second gear when Willa is captured. Bob gropes his way out of a drug-induced fog as he tries to rescue her.
An emerging string of characters adds to the movie's encompassing weirdness. Among them are members of the bizarrely named Christmas Adventurer's Club, a highly selective fraternity of powerful white men who stand for racial purity. Lockjaw yearns to join their ranks.
Benicio del Toro delivers a funny comic turn as a martial arts instructor who sides with the revolutionaries. He also shelters immigrants the government would like to expel.
The humor hinges on overstatement, broadly drawn characters, shaggy detail, and unconstrained lunacy. Always a bit confused, Ferguson spends most of the movie trying to evade capture while still wearing the tattered bathrobe in which he flees the police. To make matters worse, time and drugs have obliterated the passwords Bob needs to reconnect with his former revolutionary colleagues so that he can discover where they've taken Willa.
Action augments the gunplay and tension. A climactic car chase over rolling hills has a stomach-dropping quality that Anderson sustains for several minutes, and just about everything in One Battle After Another benefits from Jonny Greenwood's edgy score.
Is One Battle After Another intended as a cautionary tale about where our divided country might be heading? Some may see it that way, but I didn’t view the movie as a flashing red light. Rather, it struck me as a depiction of the febrile craziness of a moment in which nearly everything seems possessed by an over-blown sense of absurdity that’s ridiculous, dangerous, and resistant to comprehension
Of course, it’s all too much, but that’s how things often feel.
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