In the Flesh: One Battle After Another

As Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, Sean Penn walks like he just got off a horse after a hard day’s ride. He walks like this at all times, as though he’s dismounting a steady stream of horses, one before each scene. He walks like this while held at gunpoint and massively erect. He walks like this with half his face blown off by a shotgun blast. He walks like this as he enters the room he believes to be his long sought-after reward, an office in the Christmas Adventurers Club headquarters, but is in reality the sterile, empty cubicle in which his fellow white supremacist cultists will gas him to death for the crime of miscegenation. When not speaking, Lockjaw has the unnerving habit of pursing and pouting his lips like a baby rooting for the breast. He looks, talks, moves, and sounds like someone attempted to create a real human version of Elzie Crisler Segar’s Popeye the Sailor Man and he’s one of the failed copies. In a broad cast of magnificent performances, Penn’s stands out.

There’s a cartoonish feel overall to One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation. From Leonardo DiCaprio’s squinty, burned-out performance as Leftist bomber turned dysfunctional single dad “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun/Bob Ferguson to the convent of revolutionary weed-growing nuns at which his daughter, Charlene (Chase Infiniti) takes shelter, we’re operating at least one remove from reality at all times. This serves at least in part to heighten rather than dilute the tensions driving the film. Border patrols and concentration camps. The whitewashing of history. The cops nakedly deploying their own masked agitators to grant themselves license to use force against protestors. Rich white men in three-quarter-zipped fleeces discussing racial purification behind closed doors (Road House’s Kevin Tighe makes a spectacular appearance in this last group as a retired general very obviously still recovering from a stroke).

The slog of revolutionary action is the film’s backbone, the volatile mixture of selflessness, self-aggrandizement, anger, despair, and conviction which produces revolutionary fighters and drives them to keep pushing the boulder up the hill. The passing of revolution’s torch from the passionate but selfish Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) and the increasingly complacent Pat to their daughter, Charlene, is just one more extension of the film’s preoccupation with the libidinal nature of both state violence and armed rebellion. Rebellion is hot-blooded and horny, a desperate assertion and re-assertion of life’s fundamental value and the glorious release of freedom. Empire is brittle. Stagnant. Self-destructive. It cuts and culls without planting. It lives in cubicles and bunkers, in conference rooms and air-conditioned SUVs. That Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman have created perhaps the richest tapestry of different shades of white I’ve ever seen in a film can hardly be an accident.

And speaking of things you’ll never see anywhere else: the car chase. Set on rolling desert roads, filmed low to the pavement and moving fast in the blistering heat shimmer of early afternoon, it is the polar opposite of its every predecessor, from the skittering kinetic terror of To Live and Die in L.A.’s famous surface street flight to the swift, surgical opening scene of Drive. We’re always in motion, but the undulation of the roads creates the illusion of a constant stop-and-start, errant punctuation in a freeform sentence. When Charlene upends this rhythm to trick her pursuer, CAC hitman Tim Smith (John Hoogenakker), it has the undeniable feel of a Wile E. Coyote bit played deadly straight. Here comes the tunnel painted on the concrete wall. It’s also kind of a perfect visual representation of political conflict in America. Cars colliding in a vast white void of sand and heat shimmer, blooming into broken glass and tangled, burning steel. I’m so glad some studio idiot gave Anderson a hundred and fifty million dollars and let him set it on fire.