REVIEW:
Paul Thomas Anderson. A director who is clearly talented and one of the best, yet doesn’t always make the best movies. He’s very much like Scorcese, which is to say he gets remarkable actors, delivers unique visions, but also is a bit pretentious and makes movies that are just too long. It is also worth noting that both directors like the same two actors… Daniel Day Lewis and Leonardo DiCaprio. For Day Lewis, two of his three best performances were in each of these directors movies. There Will Be Blood was PT Andersons movie and Gangs of New York was Scorsese’s. His other best performance was in Spielberg’s Lincoln, of course. And for Dicaprio, he has been Scorcese’s go to guy for about two decades now, starring in nearly every one of the director’s films.
One Battle After Another is DiCaprio’s first time working with PT Ansderson, and like most of the world, DiCaprio is a huge fan of the director’s best movie, Boogie Nights. That was also one of Anderson’s first movie (it was certainly his breakout film that brought him to the public’s attention,) It’s a shame that he hasn’t made anything that can compete with that since, but Boogie Nights just perfectly captured lightning in a bottle, and really delved into the party scene atmosphere and world of its characters like very few other movies have ever been able to do.
One Battle After Another is not on that level, of course, but it’s still pretty good. The movie is about a revolutionary or terrorist, depending on whose side you’re on and how you’re looking at it. Bob (DiCaprio,) and his team don’t do mass bombings or murders or anything like that, where they kill a bunch of people, but they do run attacks. They do set off explosives. And they are out for a cause. The first act (first hour out of a nearly three hour film,) is mostly about Bob and his girlfriend. We see how they are both alike and different, and watch as she starts up a relationship with one of the men who his hunting her team down, (Colonel Lockhart, played by Sean Penn.) Then we watch as she becomes a mother, and she and Bob have very different ideas about parenting.
From there, we move into the second act, which is the act where we kind of get lost. I suppose this act is about Bob’s daughter, although there’s quite a lot of filler in here that could have been cut. That being said, the movie does almost always feel like a roller coaster ride (especially in the first hour,) with lots of tracking shots, walking behind characters as they walk quickly, and staying on a shot for just a brief moment before cutting to another shot. Anderson is a masterful director, and this movie really shows it. But like Scorcese, he’s not good at trimming the fat. We don’t need to meet all of the daughter’s friends, for example, and learn a little about each of them. That being said, the scene where Bob answers the door and one of her friends is there to pick her up, and he grabs the boy and starts threatening him, is pretty hilarious.
The third act of the movie is where things really come together. This is where characters get separated and have to go on their own paths that may or may not lead back to each other. This is where there’s a top secret and very discreet and unexciting assassin on the loose, Michael Clayton-style. And it’s where we get a truly terrific car chase up and down rolly hills on an empty desert highway. The first and third act definitely makeup for the second being a little slow, but I can’t help but wonder how much better this movie would have been, had they found a way to cut it down a bit and make it tighter and more compact. That being said, it’s an always interesting, incredibly well-made, hearth-pounding, intense movie.