One Battle After Another (The Movie)

On the afternoon of the eve of an expected government shutdown, I took myself to the movies to see One Battle After Another. Michelle Goldberg of The NY Times has called it the best movie she has seen in years. Her effusive praise seems somewhat exaggerated to me, especially given the film's extremely violent character. On the other hand, her characterization of the film as "A political thriller shot through with absurdist humor," which "has several scenes that might have seemed imaginatively dystopian when they were shot, but now look like news outtakes," does capture an important aspect of the movie's sensibility.

As is so often the case with the action movie genre, this film excessively glamorizes, romanticizes, and (worst of all) routinizes violence and mayhem. In this movie, much of the violence is ostensibly politically motivated - perpetrated both by presumably leftist "revolutionaries" (a group called "French 75") and by anti-immigrant, white supremacists. In this film, each at times as violent and lawless as the other. 

The movie's violent "revolutionaries" evoke memories of actual 1960s and 1970s far-left, Marxist militant, terrorist groups like the Weather Underground, except that their activities are portrayed as more contemporary, particularly their apparent support for threatened immigrants. Despite their violent and illegal activities, we are nonetheless drawn into the family story of one revolutionary couple, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), and their mixed-race child, Charlene. In the course of their revolutionary crime spree, Perfidia sexually humiliates a military officer, Stephen Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who in turn becomes sexually obsessed with her. When he finally captures Perfidia, she becomes a government witness but then disappears into Mexico. Meanwhile, the revolutionary group is broken, and Pat and Charlene flee under new identities as Bob and Willa Ferguson.

Sixteen years later in what is presumably the present, Willa (Chase Infiniti) is in high school in the "sanctuary city" where she lives with somewhat drugged and dysfunctional father. Meanwhile, Lockjaw gets invited to join a society of white supremacists, the "Christmas Adventurers." To cover up his sexual relationship with Willa's Black mother, Lockjaw hunts for her, and the second half of the film is largely a dramatization of that chase and its spill-over effects for Bob and Willa, the local immigrant community, and others. The movie is well titled. It is basically just one battle after another, after another, after another.

The only really redemptive element in the film is the mutual love and care between Bob and Willa, which causes Bob to go to such extraordinary lengths to save her from Lockjaw.

An important sub-plot is the status and treatment of immigrants. Benicio Del Toro is magnificent as a local martial arts instructor who also operates a network for migrants. The precarious position of immigrants in an increasingly hostile society is one area where this movie become more than a showcase for violence and lawlessness and connects sadly with the news of the day.