One Battle After Another is streaming for free on HBO Max now (which I'm happy about, I considered renting it earlier in the week and waited because it's a long film and I didn't think I had time on weeknights to finish it).
A few things. It is easily the most accessible of PT Anderson's films. He's made so many great films over his career -- I think there are more profound films he has directed, but I think this film will probably earn him the largest general audience / box office.
Another is that viewer literacy is so down nowadays. I've seen so many bad interpretations or takes on films, even general ones, in recent years. People writing this one off as "propaganda" are kinda missing the point and I think it's just based on the 30 minutes of opening, where they checked out / were already looking for complaints or failed to watch the entire film. Pretty much the excesses in this film are not really slants because we've already seen them to exist in the news or are already obvious. I don't think 30 minutes of what amounts to "black revolutionary movements" is done in a necessarily flattering light just because our protagonists spring from that pool. The film is a dark comedy/drama and there's criticism across the board. I kinda didn't take anything personally, and there's excesses noted in any group that appears in the film.
Probably the only person who is untainted in this film is Willa (the daughter), because she's a product of all the forces in her past and didn't ask for any of this. The next level of "hero" I guess could be Bob (the dad) but he's also kind of a burned-out junkie mess whose saving grace is that, despite all of his mistakes and failures and paranoia, always showed genuine concern for his daughter and goes after her against great odds when she disappears with no regard for his own life. And Benicio del Toro's character, the sensei, who is never flustered by any of the film's craziness and pretty much succeeds at whatever he does even if it's just running interference. And potentially the Native American bounty hunter, with a grey moral past, who decides what his moral standards are and then sticks to them. But pretty much everyone else is severely compromised and/or just ass.
The film takes a lot of time for setup, but like much of PTA's films, it's a love letter to its characters. He always has focused on character in the past and that's the same here, just in a more commercial film.
It's a film that shows how much is involved behind the scenes in certain political efforts and how what is used as the front for those efforts might actually have multiple or different reasons in the backend.
The "chase" scene is referred to by some reviewers, so I was expecting a chase scene. It's not really a chase scene in the conventional sense, although it's got some tension (driven partly by Greenwood's music, which likes to employ at times a steady "tick" in the background to push towards an inevitable encounter or an occasional blare that overwhelms the viewer to add shock to a sequence). It's more dramatic than an action chase, honestly. But again it shows how resourceful Willa is. It's funny how much like her mom she is, without ever having met her, and how either that comes from her and/or her father's memories of her while raising his daughter.
Anyway, yeah, it's easily one of the best produced films of the year, where a lot of commercial films are "less than" or are just genre films.
www.nydailynews.com
www.hollywoodreporter.com
