We actually did it: The Delmar Dads three-person movie group attended a film for 12 consecutive months to support the independent Spectrum Theater.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing. On two occasions, one of us (me) had to seek special dispensation from club officers to move the night from the second Wednesday of the month to the second Tuesday. In addition, one of us (not me), didn’t attend the July event. Nonetheless, it was a successful and fulfilling year, which kicked off last November with the stellar film Anora, included some studs and duds along the way, and concluded last night when I chose for my turn One Battle After Another.
I picked One Battle After Another because it’s garnered a lot of buzz, and I knew that one of us (not me) had expressed eagerness to see the film. Like many films coming out of Hollywood these days, this one was designed to appeal to as large an audience as possible within the scope of its story. Thus the current trend of mashing up genres—this film rolled political thriller, action, comedy, and drama all into one production that ran almost three hours long, a length that would normally be a deal-killer for us, but as I said, there was expressed eagerness to see the film, and I’m the kind of person who wants to please my mates when possible.
Plot summary: the film opens with a long sequence (every scene and sequence is a tad long) in which an underground revolutionary group called French 75 raids an immigration detention center and frees the detainees.
The group is led by a couple in love—Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfida (Teyana Taylor). The raid includes a strange, sexualized confrontation between Perfida and a whacked-out military officer, the aptly-named Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn, who I didn’t even recognize), one of the weirdest and most perverse characters I’ve ever seen in film.
The colonel’s subsequent hunting down of Perfida, their trading of sex, Perfida’s ratting out her mates for leniency, and then her escape, finally bring us to the central plot: Perfida gives birth to a daughter, disappears, and leaves Bob to raise the child, only to have Colonel Lockjaw enter the picture again years later to track down the now-teenage daughter, Willa (an excellent Chase Infiniti) who lives with her washed-up-revolutionary-now-paranoid-stoner father, Bob. The lily-white colonel, who got himself mixed up with the black Perfida due to his uncontrollable sexual desires, needs to eliminate Willa if she proves to be his daughter, because he wants to join an exclusive white-supremacist club.
If all of this sounds convoluted, it is, but director Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood) stays in control of the story, pacing, and structure. The film is never confusing and never slow. It includes outstanding performances by the actors, including Benicio Del Toro who helps protect immigrants and aids Bob in his search for his kidnapped daughter.
There’s plenty of action and an exciting car chase like none I’ve seen before, if you like that kind of thing, which I do. The soundtrack is strong. The film is overall extremely entertaining and built for winning awards.
But the comedy bits meant to lighten the unsettling subject matter don’t always work. The mashup of many genres leads to tonal dissonance. No one in Hollywood makes a film anymore that is simply a strong story well told. There are no more quiet dramas or screwball comedies or straight-out suspense films. The mission is to do it all in one film. One Battle After Another can’t do it all, but it does a lot and is worth seeing.
