One Battle After Another

 

Leonardo DiCaprio in “One Battle After Another.” Warner Bros. Pictures photo via IMDb.com

A few months after the provocative “Eddington” tried to find black humor in America's slippery slide toward fascism, iconic writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson mines the same sardonic vein in the action-packed “One Battle After Another.”

Leonard DiCaprio stretches his Oscar-winning versatility into Cheech and Chong mode to play the film's antihero, Bob, who, it should be noted, goes through most of the film's nonstop chases, shootouts and road rages wearing a bathrobe. 

Sixteen years earlier, his name was “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun. He and his honey, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), were political revolutionaries. Not the horned boogeymen we hear about in White House press briefings, but the real kind. Anti-capitalistic warriors, armed to the teeth with explosives and big honkin' machine guns.

They liberated migrants from heavily guarded immigration holding facilities. They robbed banks. They had code words and rendezvous points. 

They were serious outlaws, and it wasn't long before they got someone killed. And not long after that, Perfidia got caught.

In any good saga of justice run amok, you've got your naïve idealists and you've got your sadistic creepos on their trail. In this case the Inspector Javert role goes to Sean Penn, adding another great performance to the big pile he's already got. His plays paramilitary commander Steve Lockjaw, a bizarro assemblage of facial twitches, racial prejudices and sexual perversions who literally makes your skin crawl whenever he shows up on screen.

Flash forward. A decade and a half later, “Bob” is hundreds of miles away, living out his assumed identity in a cloud of pot smoke in the fictitious little town of Baktan Cross. His assorted addictions and paranoia don't interfere with his being a devoted, conscientious single dad to daughter Willa (Chase Infinity), as feisty and rebellious as her mom once was.

Although Bob has groomed his daughter to be on guard – including martial arts training from “Sensei” Benicio Del Toro – he never filled her in all the details about why. Still, no one could have anticipated the circumstances that would bring officer Lockjaw – walking like he's got a broomstick stuck you know where – back on their trail, accompanied by a flack-jacketed, night-visioned, armed-to-the-teeth army that's the stuff of a certain White House advisor's wet dreams.

Once Lockjaw's guys get their hands on Willa and whisk her away, Bob's quest to rescue her sets the scene for one epic chase and narrow escape after another.

At almost three hours long, “One Battle…” takes its time proving it's a comedy, or living up to early reviews proclaiming it a masterpiece. Taken from Thomas Pynchon's “Vineland” written in 1990, its pre-tech vision of armed leftist radicals feels a little quaint in light of what actually has gone down in the decades since it was written. It was written almost two decades before Steve Jobs came up with the iPhone. Phone booths are as essential as they were for Superman at advancing the plot.

Filmmaker Anderson – a disciple of screen giants like Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese – is equally adept at broad farce and subtle nuance. When it comes to satirical targets, he knows there are plenty of crazies, as they say, “on both sides.” 

DiCaprio is at his best when he's hilariously exasperated trying to remember spy network code words after years of frying his brain on drugs and booze. The forces on the other side include a secret society of ultra-wealthy, country-club-style white supremacists. They call their brotherhood the Christmas Adventurers Club (wink, wink).

Despite its long run time, the film gets better – more chaotically comic – as it goes along. It all culminates in a “Bullit”-class car chase on a surreal, roller-coaster stretch of deserted California highway east of L.A. While early praise proclaiming “One Battle…” the year's best film feels more like wishful thinking than a dispassionate appraisal, you still leave the theater energized, happy to have been along for the crazy ride.