Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest cinematic venture, ‘One Battle After Another’, kicks off with pandemonium. As dusk descends, a progressive Californian rebel group, the French 75, ravages an immigration detention center in Otay Mesa against the blaring backdrop of Jonny Greenwood’s music. The audience is quickly introduced to the primary characters — Bob (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), an expert in explosives, the vigilant Deandra (Regina Hall), and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a character marked by her bold and unthinking nature.
Perfidia instructs Bob to orchestrate a spectacle, which he masterfully does with a stunning display of fireworks and artillery. In a parallel narrative, Perfidia discovers the camp warden, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), in a deceptively calm state, lying on a cot. She demands his compliance at gunpoint, after which she proceeds to hustle him out of the room.
On entering ‘One Battle After Another’, I initially speculated it to be Anderson’s initiative to capture the mainstream, considering Warner Bros. had bankrolled the project with a reported $140 million and the casting of the box-office heavyweight DiCaprio. But within mere minutes into the film, I promptly realized the fallacy of my assumption.
This film also intersects a heartwarming father-daughter plot line. Sixteen years subsequent to the original chaos, we’re reacquainted with Bob, now settled in Humboldt County with his adolescent daughter Willa (newcomer Chase Infiniti), persistently anxious about his past showing up with a vengeance. The film serves as a melting pot of various thematic styles – comic absurdity, thrilling action scenes, encapsulating socio-political aspects prevalent today such as immigration raids, furious demonstrations, and intrusive surveillance.
The movie strikes a balance between grandeur and intimacy, between chilling and comic moments. It definitely has the potential to be Anderson’s tour de force. Claiming that it deserves a place in the pantheon of Anderson’s greatest works like ‘There Will Be Blood’, ‘The Master’ and ‘Boogie Nights’ is certainly not an exaggeration.
Anderson is shown grappling with the wave of praise for his work. The acclaim is powerful enough to emotionally elevate him, keeping him buoyed for a considerable amount of time. Discussing ‘One Battle After Another’, Anderson comments that this story has a timeless quality to it. According to him, it could have been relevant two decades back; it could even have been pertinent during medieval times; or even set amid the vast expanses of outer space.
The youthful Infiniti, at 25 years of age, has already aced her craft last year in the limited series ‘Presumed Innocent’. There she portrayed the daughter of Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga. ‘One Battle After Another’ marks her big screen debut and is set to catapult her into the larger public consciousness.
Speaking about Willa, Anderson ardently asserts, ‘She’s the character I hold dearest.’ He profoundly believes that the upcoming generation, equipped with the right ideologies and the power of technology, can rectify the wrongs committed by our predecessors.
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