Many spoilers ahead. The movie is on HBO Max. Go watch it right now.
One Battle After Another is a film in which the heroes are left-wing revolutionaries with contempt for American institutions. It is a film in which the primary antagonist is a hardline anti-immigration white supremacist military man who uses the federal government as a tool for settling his own personal animus. It is a film in which the primary heroine, a bi-racial teenage girl who earlier in the film berates her father for his lack of understanding of gender nonconformity, achieves her goals by escaping a series of neo-Nazis and killing an assassin who attempts to kill her explicitly because of her racial lineage. It is a film in which the most demonstrably powerful white supremacists commit murder by sending their targets to a makeshift gas chamber. There is an onslaught of criticism of the film that it is not left-wing enough.
When One Battle After Another, which had been receiving preemptive Oscar buzz for months and years before its release, was being promoted, I intentionally avoided information about it to the best of my ability—I knew some of the basic details, but with Paul Thomas Anderson directing and Leonardo DiCaprio as the male lead, two men with about as high of a hit rate as anybody in modern cinema, I was confident that it was going to be worth seeing without further context. And it was. I saw the first showing of it I could find—an IMAX at 11 a.m. on the day it was released—and it was so exhilarating that I felt dizzy on the drive home. There are a few moments in the film that range somewhere between a jump-scare and a jump-laugh, and being able to enjoy all of them without being aware they were coming is the kind of experience that makes me avoid spoilers, because while I could (and would) re-watch One Battle After Another and enjoy it, I could never have that specific experience ever again.
It is not a perfect film—there are moments of convenience in the plot that, when you think about it, don’t make much sense. Why would revolutionaries working seemingly circa Occupy Wall Street adopt the late 60s/early 70s spoken word anthem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” as their code, both as an aesthetic choice and from a “you know, this song has tens of millions of plays on Spotify, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that some random bystander happens to be familiar with Gil Scott-Heron” perspective? While I understand why the white supremacist Christmas Adventurers would have no particular fondness for the bi-racial Willa, why would they deem her worthy of murder, as it’s not as though their modus operandi is massacring every non-white person they can find? But the film is so expertly crafted that these thoughts are not top of mind on first viewing—the sheer excitement is.
I assumed on first viewing that criticisms of it would come from the right—that JD Vance would have a whiny tweetstorm about Hollywood values and having a far-left politician like Sean Penn portraying what is essentially an ICE agent showed a disconnect with Real America. This did happen to some degree, but perhaps because One Battle After Anotherwasn’t a true blockbuster, it wasn’t as overpowering as I expected. Criticism of the Sean Penn character, it turned out, often came not because it was a cartoonish depiction of a right-winger (which it arguably was), but because he was a bad guy. But this criticism is less a critique of OBAA than it is a critique of fictional storytelling in general.
What is particularly maddening is that while I think One Battle After Another not only deserved the Best Picture award it won last night but that it is a well above-average winner, it is not a subtle movie. This isn’t a complicated psychological drama along the lines of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master; it is a well-executed thriller along the lines of The Fugitive. The end results of Sean Penn’s character—grotesquely shot in the face, left to die on the side of the highway, ignominiously incinerated by the “Jeffrey Epstein? The New York financier?” meme guy—make his awfulness abundantly obvious. And yet because he has moments of satisfaction, some have chosen to believe that these moments reflect the worldview of the film—that because there is not a flashing light with voiceover to immediately condemn his racism, that this makes the film accommodating to it.
This film is absolutely not centrist from a left vs. right perspective—the right is thoroughly vilified. But there is one argument from the left that I think is a fair observation, which is that the film does seem to perceive the French 75 resistance force as essentially useless and full of delusions of grandeur. The collective claim to be fighting for a righteous cause but ultimately do not appear to have a goal in mind—expression of their anger is the primary objective. Perfidia in particular uses revolutionary language to justify her less-than-admirable characteristics (a common refrain is that the film is disrespectful towards black women, though I would argue that Deandra, and to a lesser extent the Sisters of the Brave Beaver, are at least moderately admirable and that this is largely a critique of the behavior of one character). The French 75 is a manifestation of righteous anger, but not of coherent goals. This contrasts sharply with Sergio St. Carlos, who does not scream about revolution but rather is calm and focused about helping a community of illegal immigrants. Among the film’s adult characters, Sergio is easily the most heroic. Even Pat/Bob, while his heart is in the right place, is shown to have simply dropped the fight—he went from revolutionary fighter to idle stoner.
To call One Battle After Another a celebration of center-leftism would not be an honest critique of its politics, but it would be fair to note that the film does seem to endorse practical action rather than performative anger. The penultimate scene of the film, in which Willa reads a letter from her mother, spells the lesson out in plain English—her parents’ generation failed to affect change. In its final scene, as Pat/Bob lays on the couch playing with his iPhone and right before Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers kick in, it is revealed that Willa is going to a protest in Oakland—not a riot, not a bombing (though also, critically, not just posting on social media), but a show of numbers against what we can only assume is a righteous cause. One Battle After Another ends, as it exists, as a critique not of the ideals of the left but as a critique of its ineffectiveness. It forces us to look inward rather than spending 162 minutes reiterating that white supremacists are bad. This is what art is supposed to do. And this is what this year’s very worthy Best Picture winner does.
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