One Battle After Another is, as the refrain goes on social media, “the movie of the year.”
Paul Thomas Anderson’s propulsive, nearly three-hour loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland starring Leonardo DiCaprio has been the rare grown-up drama that’s drawn enormous critical praise, high audience scores and solid box office — crossing the $100 million mark worldwide to score the biggest opening of Anderson’s career.
Given that the film is also intensely political — telling the tale of a burned out revolutionary (DiCaprio) who endeavors to save his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from a white nationalist military officer (Sean Penn) — it’s perhaps surprising there hasn’t been more noise so far from those on the right. The film opens with a celebratory raid on an ICE facility to free detainees, and shows government agents coldly executing unarmed suspects and sending an undercover agent into a peaceful protest to throw a Molotov cocktail to justify increased force.
One suspects a three-hour indie drama about left-wing rebels doesn’t draw the same level of interest from conservative moviegoers as, say, a remake of a family classic like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But there are some grumblings out there that contend the film, which Anderson had worked on for decades, is actually the wrong film at the wrong time rather than the opposite.
“You can make excuses for it, but basically the [film is] an apologia for radical left-wing terrorism, that’s what it is,” said Ben Shapiro, who predicted the film will win “all the Academy Awards” due to its politics. “It has the subtlety of a brick … The basic suggestion is a conspiracy theory in which the United States is run by white supremacist Christian nationalists and all people of color and a few nice incompetent fellow travelers like [DiCaprio’s character] are going to take on that entire system. And that system must be taken on at the cost of family, at the cost of friendship, at the cost of decency, at the cost of basic human capacity for success. It is better, in other words, to be a complete loser who wastes your life bombing things randomly in order to free illegal immigrants to run willy-nilly across the border than to be a productive citizen.”
“For this movie to make any sense at all, one has to believe the United States, today, right now, is a fascist dictatorship,” wrote David Marcus at Fox News, under a headline that dubbed the film an “ill-timed apologia for left-wing violence.” He continued, “That is not only a dangerous fallacy but, as we have found out recently, a deadly one … The whole movie made me a little angry, but then I remembered that the Trump administration is cracking down on Antifa — today’s very real domestic terrorists — and maybe this will be a fun movie for them to watch once they are all in jail.”
“It’s a macabre coincidence that One Battle After Another opens so soon after the assassination of peaceable conservative debater Charlie Kirk,” wrote The National Review under a headline predicting “there will be bloodlust” provoked by the movie. “The film undeniably romanticizes political assassination … Anderson intentionally provokes the bloodlust of his woke confreres (and Gen Z viewers who know nothing about the Sixties) by celebrating the insipid, heretical, and violent activities of the liberal past and present. Anderson’s title lacks Pynchon’s pith but daydreams a culture of never-ending political obstruction and pandemonium. It is the year’s most irresponsible movie.”
“Watching One Battle After Another may not be entertaining, but its celebration of vitriol and murder is clarifying,” opined The Blaze. “This is not the usual ‘anti-conservative’ Hollywood bias. When the perpetually sweaty DiCaprio shouts ‘¡Viva la revolución!’ while detonating bombs, you’re meant to cheer. And if you’re not cheering, well, those bombs are meant for you … Increasingly, Hollywood views half the country not as fellow citizens with outdated beliefs, but as enemies who deserve punishment. Owning firearms, favoring borders, voting differently — these aren’t policy differences; they’re treated as moral crimes, grounds for extermination.”
Some critics, however, have maintained the film’s politics play more like a satirical fantasy — from its conspiratorial white supremacist cabal to its ultra-organized French Resistance-style left-wing network to Col. Lockjaw’s cartoonish Dr. Strangelove-style demeanor. The opening flashback of rebels attacking a detention facility would have taken place during Obama’s first presidency, many years before President Trump’s first term sparked intense backlash to U.S. immigration policies.
The progressive staple The New Republic weighed in on this subject with an essay exploring the film’s political themes and concluded that One Battle is a dream of a left-wing movement that doesn’t exist.
“The least believable part is the corresponding existence of a left-wing revolutionary group that physically fights back,” wrote David Klion, noting “the rebels in Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie resemble the Weather Underground less than the right’s conspiratorial image of ‘antifa supersoldiers’ … The audience at my screening seemed to be having a total blast, laughing and cheering throughout — and while I experienced One Battle After Another the same way, in hindsight it was a somewhat discordant reaction given the all-too-relevant depictions of immigrant families being torn apart by armed federal agents.”
And in a column for The Hollywood Reporter, Richard Newby pushed back on the notion that the film is pro-violence in any way: “While some argue the film celebrates political violence, it doesn’t at all. It depicts it as a temporary solution, one that, when drawing battle lines, only results in casualties on both sides and creates victims out of those who suffer under the same realities of America.”