There are movies that, rather than being watched, run over, crush, taking everything they touch with them, including the viewer's own gaze. It is said (probably the most repeated and most apocryphal legend in the history of cinema) that the viewers of the Lumière brothers' 1896 film Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station were not just surprised but feared for their lives. The clattering train entering from the right of the screen towards the audience threatened them. Yes, it entertained them, filled them with astonishment, even moved some, but above all, the metal machine portrayed for the first time in motion in smoky black and white was there heading towards them ready to run them over. It was pleasure, but above all, it was also concern. One battle after another, the latest prodigy of probably the most prodigious of active directors, is basically that: it is a movie, but above all, it is an accident, it is a call for help, it is a warning about the corrosive and acidic danger emanating from today's society in particular and life, in general, at any time. Rather than being watched, it runs over.
This is not the first time Paul Thomas Anderson approaches a Thomas Pynchon book to adapt it in his own way. He did it in Inherent Vice with a more hallucinogenic than explicit spirit. The idea then was not so much to tell anything but to let it be told. The story set in the 70s wanted to be an impressionistic portrait of a city suddenly turned into a state of mind, a way of being in the world, an enigma within a mystery wrapped in a riddle. Or vice versa. Now, based on the 1992 novel Vineland, the film travels to the 60s to specifically tell a story of defeats, that of all the more or less revolutionary, more or less utopian, more than less violent movements determined to change the state of things. From there —barely the place and reason for the first moments of the film—, the story jumps to the 80s, to the very heart of Reagan's conservatism.
Hidden in a sanctuary community away from everything and especially at a distance from their own fiery past, live those who remain, or malremain, from that fray. There is the troubled Bob Ferguson, portrayed on the verge of a heart attack by Leonardo DiCaprio in the company of his daughter, embodied by the newcomer Chase Infiniti. They hide from everyone and especially from the memory and the ghost of the former's wife and the latter's mother. She is the most revolutionary, the most treacherous, the most perfidious; she is Perfidia or, better, the actress now on her way to becoming a myth, Teyana Taylor. Behind them all, the CIA, the FBI, a group of white supremacists, and, as an exception, the character played by Sean Penn, the incarnation of the devil himself, on his way to his third Oscar. And among them all, let's not forget Benicio del Toro in the role of a Latino sensei, also the last refuge of dignity in a crumbling world, engaged in another year of triumph.
One of the moments in 'One battle after another'E. M.
What follows, as mentioned, is a moving train ready to sweep everything away. What follows is, without any excuses or sense of measure, a journey to the very depths of contemporary consciousness through a frantic, unapologetic, and irrefutable cinematic exercise. What follows, indeed, continues. It is comedy due to its festive and almost obscene propensity for tragedy; it is a grand profane and mystical puppet show where the demons of a time confronted with the migration crisis are aired as testimony and consequence of all possible crises (economic, moral, environmental, and Trumpian); it is Paul Thomas Anderson unleashed (with a certain Tarantino-esque breath and aroma, let's admit it) as electric as in Magnolia, as introspective as in Phantom Thread, as cheerfully cryptic as in The Master, as cacophonic and disruptive as in There Will Be Blood, and as enamored of cinema and love as in Licorice Pizza, Punch-Drunk Love, or, why not, Boogie Nights.
Robert Bresson said that a film should resemble what you see when you close your eyes. And now the question: What did the Lumière brothers see the first time they closed their eyes? Why did they decide that one of the inaugural images captured by their newly patented invention would be that of a train heading towards the audience? Perhaps they were simply seeking to be surprised. That or the idea was to draw on the screen the line that already separated the world. On one side, time normalized under the logic of machines, smoke, and the rigor of factories. On the other, time, finally free, with no rules other than the capricious chance of imagination enclosed in a white screen pierced by a locomotive. Perhaps they closed their eyes and simply saw the possibility of building a gaze like never before, a collective gaze that would define not only an emerging art, cinematography, as a rigorously different time. They closed their eyes and, how strange, gave all of us new eyes. And undoubtedly, Paul Thomas Anderson and his One battle after another advocate for this ever-renewed faith: new eyes for the movie of the year, a movie of the year for being timely, committed, and purely inertia-driven.
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti. Duration: 170 minutes. Nationality: United States.