One Battle After Another: Inherent ICE
Did Paul Thomas Anderson just make an action movie? Yes and no. Certainly, One Battle After Another is a robust and muscular production, replete with car chases, kidnappings, and explosions. Yet its most exhilarating sequence—the one that best encapsulates its singular combination of tumultuous suspense and whip-smart comedy—is just a guy talking on the phone.
It helps, of course, that said guy is Leonardo DiCaprio, one of our last true movie stars. He plays Bob Ferguson, a lapsed revolutionary whose stormy past as an ideological militant has long since subsided into a cloud of bong smoke and disorientation. With his scraggly facial hair and his fried brain cells, Bob seems an unlikely hero of a decades-spanning epic from the acclaimed director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. But One Battle After Another, which Anderson adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, has no interest in being bound by expectation or convention. It is a wildly ambitious picture that takes as its subject no less than the precarity of the American experiment, yet it is also an intimate family melodrama—a poignant tale of darkened souls clawing their way back toward the light. Read More
