ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is in the minds of some people the great film of the year, or the decade or ever. I delayed seeing it because the hype was going to get in the way...I knew that I wasn't going to love it on that level...so I waited.
I didn't expect to dislike as much as I did. I don't hate it, but I surely don't love it enough to put it on my best of the year list or include it in my critics' groups voting.
A tonally all over the place "black comedy" ONE BATTLE is an overly messy story of revolutionaries, the man hunting them and the current far right mind set that non-whites and immigrants are bad. The plot has a pair of revolutionary lovers getting into trouble when a bank robbery goes wrong. One goes into witness protection, and the other raises their daughter. Into the mix add a military man who hunting them having an affair with one of them.
Much of the film is played deadly serious with a very well-earned paranoia coloring everything. At the same time Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) has a bumbling bomb maker played by Leonardo DiCaprio as the main character. Di Caprio feels like he's from another movie. He's twitchy and manic and kind of makes you wonder why anyone would spend time with him, other than he makes good bombs. Yes, his twitches are funny but at the same time you wonder about how he remains upright and alive in a world where the authorities are just shooting people dead. Instead of pulling me in, DiCaprio's manic nature pushed me aside. I kept hoping he would get killed so the film didn't feel like it was swinging from pillar to post.
Part of the problem is the film's inspiration. Because PTA didn’t feel that he could do justice to Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, he wrote his own script that was inspired by Pynchon’s work. It’s a nice thing to do, but there is a reason that there are only a couple of films based on his works and that is because what Pynchon does with words really doesn’t translate well to cinema. Pynchon’s words bend the ideas and smooth out the rough spots that occur with his off-kilter plotting. His plotting and characters are so of his world that when you try to film the events of his novels things don't work on screen remotely close to how they are on the page. What should be humorous comes off as awkward or forced. This forced nature is the problem here, the melding of humor and serious, particularly in DeCaprio’s performance, falls flat. I know several people who have called it the best performance of the year, but I don’t think it is. I think people are noticing it not because it is a good performance integrated into the story but that it stands out like a nail from a floorboard that needs to be hammered down. This is particularly apparent when you compare it to Sean Penn’s role as a psychopathic military man. Yes, Penn’s character is wildly over the top and is in many ways the same crazy as DiCaprio, but he keeps his performance more controlled. He fits in with the rest of the cast who are playing it closer to real.
I am also not certain about the world the film operates in. It feels like the wrong sort of alien. While I appreciate the fight for immigrant rights, the political battle of blowing places up and other acts seems like it is 50 years out of date. The whole thing feels like it’s a world view from the 1960’s or 70’s, but not from reality, but from a world view gained by watching movies. I found it kind of quaint. Especially when you add in the whole secret white supremacist plot line. The white supremacists aren’t hiding anymore, and they haven’t been for the better part of a decade. The hate mongers are out in the open and running the government. The sense of unreality is something that PTA has been battling with off and on in his films. For example, while I know that his LICORISH PIZZA is based on actual events the truth is that the time period in which it was set, feels completely alien. I was alive and of the age of those characters, but none of it felt real, even for characters living on the other side of America. Actually, like OBAA it felt like it’s a world view created based on movies and not life as lived.
I have issues with the pacing. I’m not certain why this film needs to be almost three hours. You will forgive me but in the last few years I have become kind of aware of films that aren’t using their run times adequately. I’m not talking about film that are setting a mood, or a sense of place or time, but films that seem to have not gotten their narrative under control. I shouldn’t be aware that time is passing or in this case stagnating. More to the point if a film is going to ramble a bit, as this film seems to do, there has to be a point where the narrative pulls in the loose threads so that we see the whole cloth as something more than what we thought. The rambling and the too long scenes should pay off. I don’t think they do. At the risk of getting beaten up, I really think that you could have chopped 45 minutes to an hour out of this and not lost anything. Actually, I think you’d have a tighter and meaner film.
Understand I don’t hate OBAA, but I truly don’t see what people find so magnificent. No wait, strike that, I do think the basic plot line is solid, but I don’t think that PTA’s version of the film is what it should be. I think it’s the work of a director who the last two times out seems to have lost his way. Not that he’s always been perfect (INHERENT VICE is messy), but this feels like a film that is battling with itself to try and tell an important story about the politics of today's world and then couch it with some off beat characters and absurd sense in a desperate effort to make it palatable to the masses. I do think PTA sees the various lines that seem to exist today, but I don’t think he fully knows how to draw them so that it really matters. I never bought the world of the disenfranchised seen here and always felt it was not being accurately being drawn by a man who grew up as part of the Hollywood establishment.
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