One Battle After Another is director Paul Thomas Anderson’s second plunge into novelist Thomas Pynchon’s pantheon: In 2014, he delivered Inherent Vice, a relatively straightforward adaptation “based on” (Anderson’s term) Pynchon’s five-year-old hard-boiled-detective yarn about a stoner private investigator, Larry “Doc” Sportello—played in a convincing fog by Joaquin Phoenix—who’s investigating the disappearance of a former girlfriend. What’s most notable in that outing is the extraordinary degree to which Anderson nails the look and feel and essential story of SoCal 1970 presented in the book.
This new film, which the director says was “inspired by” Pynchon’s Vineland, is a different animal altogether: If the novel, published in 1990, was a glance back at Nixon’s War on Drugs and the ensuing Reagan-era clampdown on dissidents, Anderson has turned it into a frightening, snatched-from-the-headlines look at the contemporary American police state, with local cops and federal forces working together everywhere, focused almost exclusively on rounding up and shipping off immigrants. It’s all the more amazing because shooting was finished well before the elections and this year’s commencement of Trump Term Two.
Vineland is a quest story: Pynchon’s protagonist, Prairie, the daughter of doper Zoyd Wheeler and hardcore, multigenerational revolutionary Frenesi Gates, spends the very dense 400 or so pages of the book trying to reconnect with her mother, who disappeared when Prairie was an infant after becoming a government informant. But Prairie has her limits: “‘You think I’m one of these kids on Phil Donahue,’ Prairie blurted, ‘shows up at some woman’s door fifteen years later goin’ ‘Mommy, Mommy!’ Hey. I have my privacy, had to fight for it sometimes, I know what that’s worth, I ain’t about to go bargin’ in on hers.” Although there are diversions to surfer-rich Southern California and flashbacks to seamy bits of Japan, most of Vineland’s telling takes place in its mythical eponymous town, set among the ancient redwoods near Humboldt County.
Pynchon is long on exposition—very long, with intricately constructed sentences filled with clever verbal flights of fancy—and surprisingly short on action. Zoyd is an almost throwaway character; he disappears from large swaths of the narrative. “‘Feel like Mildred Pierce’s husband Bert,’ is how Zoyd described his inner feelings to Frenesi.” That’s one monstrously succinct character summation in a single sentence, and really does peg Zoyd, if you know Bert from the James M. Cain novel or its film adaptations.
In Anderson’s telling—and he changes all the names—One Battle After Another becomes a very sweet father-daughter...rom-com is not quite the right word, but it’s clear they love each other, and there are constant laughs. Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob Ferguson—a retired revolutionary, to the extent you can ever retire from that life—who’s had greatness thrust upon him in the form of a daughter, Willa, played by newcomer Chase Infiniti, who, like Prairie, is abandoned by her mother as an infant.
The movie opens with Willa’s parents liberating a group of immigrants who’ve been rounded up on the U.S.-Mexico border, shortly before Willa’s birth. It’s during the film’s rising action that Bob delivers the movie’s title phrase, but not with the connotation the words seem to carry, situated atop a film that’s filled with physical and psychological violence. Instead, he’s referring to the challenge of bringing up a kid in a horrible world, one battle after another.
In an effort to minimize those battles, and with help from a fellow revolutionary (wonderfully played, with a deep sense of nit-picking detail, by Paul Grimstad, whose day job is running undergraduate studies in the humanities at Yale), Bob changes his identity and Willa’s (in dissident days, he’d been “Ghetto” Pat Calhoon; she’d been Charlene) and moves to the mythical town of Baktan Cross, where the action—and the bulk of the film—resumes 16 years later. Willa’s now a high school student, a good one, with leadership potential, taking martial arts lessons from Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, performed with great comic relish by Benicio Del Toro. And Bob is still a doper, watching Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, likely the greatest film ever about revolutionary guerrillas, venting his frustration with what revolutionaries have become, calling his former comrades, and insisting on talking to a supervisor when he can’t get some info he wants. Bob’s also hitting the bottle—so much so that Willa has to lay into him regularly.
Unfortunately for Bob and Willa, Baktan Cross becomes a sanctuary city, and one that holds great interest for Sean Penn’s pitch-perfect Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Oscar material), who had been obsessed with Willa’s mother, to a degree that makes him believe he might actually be Willa’s father. A parallel notion was hinted at but dismissed by Pynchon regarding Prairie.
If Pynchon is all about language, Anderson is in many ways the opposite: all action, all the time. There’s an absolutely extraordinary car chase, shot at the Texas Dip near Borrego Springs, anchored by an incredibly novel first-person perspective. And some hilarious patter among Christian white-nationalist members of the aptly named Christmas Adventurers Club, droning on about racial purity: “You want to save the planet, you start with immigration” (sound familiar?).
Ultimately, both Pynchon and Anderson are telling us family stories. Not quite the kind of family story John Ford gave us in The Searchers, but real reflections on what it means to have decidedly nontraditional families: two motherless units, both steeped in political turmoil. Pynchon’s presents a hefty helping of historical perspective; Anderson’s is frighteningly visceral and contemporary.
But it’s not without levity and humor. When a group of Willa’s high school friends shows up in the Fergusons’ driveway, Bob wants to know their pronouns, asks if one of them is transitioning, questions whether he needs to use “they.” And in what may be the most endearing moment in the film, Willa attempts to teach her dad how to take a selfie. It’s a scene filled with resonance: Willa once surreptitiously had a phone—and, in fact, gets caught by Lockjaw and put through the wringer because of it—and now the two of them are looking at each other, and Willa is talking about which way to hold the thing and how to turn on the flash. Bob just doesn’t get it—and probably doesn’t really care—but then there’s a radio message that’s pulling his daughter into action.
At some point in the movie, apropos Willa, someone says, “The daughter of a rat is a baby rat.” But clearly she’s not. And Bob knows that. So he’s more concerned about that drive to Oakland than he is about using his new phone. “That’s three and a half hours from here,” he says to Willa, sounding like an almost crotchety, overbearing dad. “Be careful.” But he’s a dad who’s kept his kid safe and gotten her launched. And Anderson seems to be saying that that’s the best we can hope for right now.•
Tom Zito is a serial entrepreneur. He came to California to report a piece on startups for the New Yorker, but launched a company instead. In addition to the New Yorker, he has written for the Washington Post, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, Life, Newsweek, and many other publications, and has started eight companies.
