Leonardo DiCaprio plays ‘Ghetto Pat’ in a film that is like a reprise of his greatest hits

2 weeks ago 2

FILM
One Battle After Another ★★★½
(M) 162 minutes

Normally I’m cautious about predicting how movies will land in the marketplace, but I’ll venture this much. Of the punters who head out over the weekend to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, lured by the title and the poster showing Leonardo DiCaprio in a dressing gown holding a machine gun, a high proportion will emerge thoroughly confused.

Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from One Battle After Another.

One Battle After Another is Anderson’s version of an action movie the way the 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love was his version of an Adam Sandler comedy. But this time the stakes are much higher: the budget has been reported as $130 million USD or more, and the upshot is somehow both his most conventional movie and his oddest yet.

One thing it isn’t in any substantial way is an adaptation of the work of Thomas Pynchon, unlike Anderson’s 2014 detective caper Inherent Vice. Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland is identified in the credits as an inspiration, but almost all that’s been borrowed is the premise, with the character names changed and the action updated to the present.

That gives us DiCaprio as the ridiculously named “Ghetto Pat,” part of a revolutionary outfit known as the French 75 operating on the US-Mexico border. After he’s sold out to the cops by his lover and comrade Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), he goes on the run under the alias “Bob Ferguson,” hiding out in the small town of Baktan Cross with their young daughter Willa (played as a teenager by Chase Infiniti).

Close to two decades on, their whereabouts is uncovered by the demented Sergeant Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), himself under investigation by a wacky yet deadly white supremacist group known as the Christmas Adventurers.

Benicio Del Toro plays an unflappable karate instructor.

That cues a series of chases, abductions and shootouts that occupy most of the movie, adhering for the most part to the simple principle of goodies versus baddies, with the white hats including Benicio Del Toro as an unflappable karate instructor and Regina Hall as another French 75 veteran.

Still, the corpses don’t pile up as rapidly as action fans might hope, and the jittery Bob is nobody’s idea of an alpha male, even if he does embark on a mission to protect his little girl after the fashion of a hero played by Liam Neeson or Jason Statham.

Rather, DiCaprio’s performance could be seen as a reprise of his greatest hits: one long paranoid freakout like Shutter Island, a physical endurance test like The Revenant, and the most effective showcase for his physical comedy talents since The Wolf of Wall Street.

Penn, meanwhile, plays the reptilian Lockjaw as a surreal cartoon, in the tradition of Buck Turgidson in Dr Strangelove and the prissy American Nazi leader in The Blues Brothers. His stiff walk suggests a G.I. Joe figurine come to life, while his lips twist as if they were trying to escape his face.

Lockjaw is so absurdly grotesque it’s as though Anderson has held himself back from imagining seriously what the seduction of fascism could amount to, nor does it seem remotely credible that the Perfidia we meet could fall for this ancient monstrosity.

Indeed, as social commentary the film is largely toothless, especially the depiction of Bob as a Generation X dinosaur cracking wise about his daughter’s non-binary friends or struggling to work the camera on his mobile phone.

Still, as a stylist Anderson hasn’t lost his audacity: there’s more cinematic invention here than in most other mainstream releases this year put together.

Even the lurching alternation of suspense, farce and sentimentality could be defended as a tactic for throwing us off-balance – a goal achieved most successfully through Jonny Greenwood’s frenetic score, which veers in spirit from Cecil Taylor to Mantovani and beyond.

One Battle After Another is in cinemas from September 25

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