One Battle After Another

Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights,” “Magnolia,” “The Phantom Thread”) has taken a novel written 35 years ago by an author often described as “unfilmable” and turned it into a vital, provocative, and disturbingly (in a good way) of-the-moment two hour and forty minute film that seems to go by in half the time. The film is a grand epic anchored by three Oscar-winners bringing their A game. It balances action, politics, metaphor, and satire, with heightened characters who are larger than life but still feel real and a knockout, urgently percussive score from Johnny Greenwood. There is also humor, some slapstick, though not handled quite as deftly.

While much of the story is original, like Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 book, Vineland, the story is about a couple who were in a militant activist group, here called the French 75. The couple is identified by the authorities just after their child was born. The woman went into the witness protection program and the man and the baby got new identities and were relocated by French 75.

Elements of the story evoke the unrest of the 1960s, when the most extreme activists protesting the Vietnam War and racial injustice broke the law, even becoming violent. The Weather Underground’s name was inspired by the Bob Dylan line that “You don’t have to be a weather man to know which way the wind blows.”Weather Underground’s Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert served more than 20 years in maximum-security prisons for their roles in a 1981 Brink’s robbery in upstate New York, in which a guard and two police officers were killed while Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers were on the run from the authorities (partly inspiring the film “Running on Empty”).

French 75 is a Weather Underground-inspired group, but their attacks are even more militaristic and violent. Anderson’s script is very loosely based on the book and substitutes more timely issues and attitudes. While, like the group in the Pynchon book they have broadly anti-capitalist, anti-oppression views, we meet them as they are about to raid a US immigration center on the Mexican border.

The character who will be called Bob for most of the film (Leonardo DiCaprio) is in charge of explosives. Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) is one of the leaders, with a fierce, aggressive attitude and a lot of guns. The soldier in charge of the center is Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn in an incendiary performance, one of his best in years. Just watch the way he walks, the heft of his shoulders. Perfidia confronts him in a scene charged with highly sexualized power dynamics. He is humiliated and enthralled.

French 75 operatives zip tie the hands of the military and unlock the cages filled with rows of cots with people shivering under silvery Mylar blankets, one of innumerable striking images from cinematographer Michael Bauman. The raiders lead the immigrants into a truck and take them across the border into the US.

Perfidia is passionate about the issues and perhaps even more by the excitement and adrenaline of their raids. Bob, a bit shy and nerdy, shows her how he builds the explosives and she finds it thrilling. Soon they are a couple. Meanwhile, Lockjaw is obsessed with her. When she is captured, he says he will help her if she is nice to him. That means naming names of French 75 members and it means sex.

Perfidia has a baby, but soon leaves the infant with Bob and disappears. Sixteen years later, the couple and the baby are hiding out. No one knows where Perfidia is; she ran away from witness protection. The father and daughter, now called Bob and Willa (an outstanding debut by Chase Infiniti), are living quietly in a small Colorado town.

Lockjaw, still in the army and still deeply conflicted, wants to find Willa to determine if he is her father, and if so, to eliminate her. Perfidia is Black and Lockjaw, like Bob, is white. Lockjaw is desperate to join an elite club of the ruling class, which accepts only members who are “homegrown” (white, American-born, and gentile, with no ties to anyone who is not). If Willa is his daughter, he will not be eligible for membership. He finds out where Bob and Willa are hiding and fabricates a reason to be deployed to the area, arriving with a platoon of heavily armed soldiers.

Willa is frustrated by Bob’s constant use of marijuana and alcohol and by what she sees as his paranoia and overly strict rules. She goes to a school party with friends and is captured. Bob, with the help of Willa’s martial arts teacher, known as Sensei (Benicio Del Toro), goes after her, still wearing the ratty bathrobe he was wearing as he waited for her at home, smoking weed and watching “Battle of Algiers.” He has a special gizmo that French 75 gave him to help find her 16 years earlier, but it has been a while and he has abused many substances, so he cannot quite remember the passwords he needs to get help from the underground network or find a place to charge his phone. (The humor of this situation wears thin.)

We go back and forth from the military interrogations (even the bravest crumble when their families are at risk) to exceptionally well-designed, very exciting various efforts to capture and rescue Willa and her attempted escapes. There are fascinating characters along the way, including weed-growing nuns, the “homegrown” cabal, and a Native American tracker/hitman.

There will be a lot of conversations about this film, and a lot of arguments about how to unpack it. Anderson has enough respect for the audience not to make it easy and enough pure talent to keep us enthralled enough to try to parse it. While there are some exaggeratedly blatant villains in the film, the more important characters are the conflicted Lockjaw and the ineffectual Bob. The best clue is with the title, reminding us, again, that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Parents should know that this movie includes peril and violence with characters injured and killed and graphic and disturbing images. guns, bombs, militant and military activity, guns and bombs. Characters smoke, drink, and use drugs and very strong and crude language. Characters are bigoted and use offensive terms.

Family discussion: How have things changed since the book that inspired this movie was written? Is Bob a good father?

If you like this, try: “White Noise”