Paul Thomas Anderson would not like us to think he makes a certain type of movie, and in truth, you can’t say anything he’s made is a direct outgrowth of something else he’s made. It’s possible, though, to say that a particular movie does not seem like it would be a PTA movie, and that brings us to his newest, One Battle After Another. Even the title does not sound Andersonian, not in the slightest. (It’s inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, but that probably didn’t strike anyone as a good name for the movie either.)

If you went only by the trailers, you might think this is truly far afield from the maker of – if we’re going to reduce him – historical pieces in which unhealthy dynamics exist between the main characters. (That covers at least Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza.) From what the marketing department has deemed advisable to reveal, One Battle After Another seems like an action movie, one involving machine guns, revolutionaries, and fascist military men.

There’s not as much action as you’re led to believe, though this is an unusually topical film for Anderson, not only set in the present day but extremely relevant to this political moment. If you’re trying to figure out what does make it an Anderson movie, you’re more likely to go to the Anderson movies we haven’t yet mentioned. Parts of the score are basically Jonny Greenwood’s interpretation of what Jon Brion did for Anderson in Punch-Drunk Love, where harried, discordant piano music increased the claustrophobia of Adam Sandler’s agitated phone conversations. There are similarly scored tense phone calls involving Leonardo DiCaprio’s character here. And speaking of his character, the most similar in Anderson’s filmography might be that of Doc Sportello from Inherent Vice, as DiCaprio has a similar shambling quality and is cuffed around like a noir hero.

We needn’t try to place the film within the context of Anderson’s whole career in order to identify why and how One Battle After Another is good. It’s good because Anderson is one of the most accomplished craftsmen we have, capable of making any sort of movie he wants. And if he, now, wants to make a movie that speaks to the current culture wars, however obliquely, then maybe it’s proof that after 30 years in the business, he’s still growing.

OBAA may be set in the present day, but it doesn’t start there. We start in the first decade of the century, when a far-left revolutionary group called the French 75 aimed to disrupt refugee detainment centres and other representatives of a fascist government (if we’re doing the maths, George W. Bush’s fascist government) via armed demonstrations of non-lethal force. Well, usually non-lethal. During one such scheme, Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) pulls a trigger she shouldn’t pull, and it leads to the tactical dissolution of her whole network by an overzealous paramilitary force.

That sends the father of her daughter, pyrotechnics expert “Ghetto” Pat Calhoun (DiCaprio), into hiding under the new identity of Bob Ferguson, and sends Perfidia into the wind. Years later, Bob has raised that daughter into confident 16-year-old Willa (Chase Infiniti). And though her dad is now a burnout given to wearing a bathrobe most of the time, Lebowski-style, and has not been anyone’s target for years, he still exercises extreme caution around Willa’s security. He doesn’t let her have a phone, but instead, she must carry a device that harmonises with the device a fellow revolutionary is carrying, to prove that you can trust them in an emergency.

Willa hardly thinks this will be necessary, and is quite a bit resentful of Bob’s paranoia, but just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. A colonel who developed an obsession with Perfidia back at the time, with the great name Steve Lockjaw (Sean Penn), hasn’t given up the quest to weed out the remaining French 75 members not yet brought to justice, and he’s gotten a new lead about their whereabouts. He’s also trying to make good with a secret society of actual fascists, the Christmas Adventurers, who want to bring him on board – but not if there’s any hint of him having had an interracial relationship with Perfidia.

Maybe it’s the presence of DiCaprio, but there’s also a whiff of Tarantino to this movie, with women shooting machine guns (hello, Jackie Brown) and Nazis arguing semantics in scenes written to be humorous (hello, Django Unchained) and baroque character names and nicknames for everyone. We sometimes forget that PTA has a sense of humour, but that’s been part of his filmography as well. The entire character of Benicio del Toro’s Mexican sensei, who helps Bob evade the pursuit of renegade soldiers and is called Sergio St. Carlos, is conceived as a laugh, and it’s a good laugh.

Anderson has never been a man to make message movies, though, as you can’t even squint to find his previous movies purposefully speaking to the moment in which they were made. He’s the kind of director who demurs when you ask him about themes. Well, that appears to end with One Battle After Another, which grapples in complicated ways with where America – indeed, the whole world – finds itself at this moment in time.

The film contains examples of both the extreme political left and the extreme political right, and it’s fair to say that neither gets off clean. The French 75, even though their activities are set in the past, exist as apparent evidence of the right’s current specious notion of a political group called Antifa, which would necessitate Donald Trump sending troops into Portland, Oregon. Before you have a chance to accuse Anderson of weakening the progressive cause, though, he produces backroom dealings between white men so grotesque that they go beyond the left’s worst nightmare of right-wing scheming.

Then there are an array of other characters who fall somewhere in between, like most of us do in the real world. Bob Ferguson may have said “Viva la revolucion!” with real political zeal in his younger years, but now he’s frustrated over trying to figure out the correct pronoun for his daughter’s non-binary friend. Meanwhile, even as Lockjaw wants to become part of the Christmas Adventurers, he’s carrying a torch for a woman the other Adventurers would torch over an open fire if they came across her in the wild.

Whether Anderson really means something by any of this, or has just made a very entertaining film that never lets up for two hours and 40 minutes, is in the eye of the beholder. There’s no doubt, though, that he’s put his prodigious skills to work maintaining the aforementioned high level of craftsmanship. Just witness the way he shoots a three-car chase through the desert in the film’s climax, the camera rolling up and down these hills and sometimes getting lost in the mirage reflecting from the road. There’s no doubt Anderson still wants to dazzle us, and regularly does.

But he’s also out to have a good time – DiCaprio and Penn are both hilarious here – and to make us think, even if he doesn’t want to tell us exactly what to think. But as Alex Garland did last year with his own movie about our current civil war – called Civil War – you can figure out what side Anderson is on pretty easily. At the very least, he’s always on the side of entertaining us with superlative filmmaking.

 

One Battle After Another is currently playing in cinemas.