Some thoughts on One Battle After Another

 

(His overarching theme, it seems to me: Deeply damaged, highly neurotic people search for love and attempt to build families. If they succeed, those families are deeply dysfunctional.)

Sure enough, the first act of One Battle After Another delineates a trio of deeply damaged, highly neurotic people with some wild doozies of hangups, searching for love and building deeply dysfunctional families.

 

The innovation that the new movie brings to this theme is “what happens next?” Once the damaged people have found love and built their dysfunctional family, what happens next? Or, rather, what happens when two dysfunctional families come into life-and-death conflict with each other?

The movie is composed rather like a symphony, with three acts that soar and simmer, percolate and undulate to rhythms well outside the Hollywood norm. At almost three hours, it never gets tiring or outstays its welcome. Rather the opposite.

 

On my first viewing, I was convinced I was watching a political thriller with a family-saga twist. What confused me was the timeline. The narrative involves a terrorist group who, sixteen years ago, went on an immigrant-freeing, anti-capitalist rampage. Doing the math, that meant that the first act of the movie would have to be set in 2009, and, while Obama was certainly deporting his fair share of immigrants, there was no bomb-throwing terrorist group upending the status quo.

It was only on my second viewing that I realized that the first act is not set in 2009, but in the present day, or maybe the near future, which places the bulk of the movie not in the political thriller territory but the sci-fi-futuristic dystopia territory. The trick the movie pulls is presenting us with a future that looks exactly like our present day.

 

That tactic suggests that, under our current dictatorship, society, technology, culture and design will grind to a dead halt, or even regress. It further suggests that our current dictatorship will be ever-more pervasive sixteen years from now, to the point where the movie never even has to name names or over-stress futuristic design choices. The ICE agents of the future won’t be wearing weird futuristic clothes, they’ll be dressed exactly as they are now. Everything will look exactly the same on the surface, it’s the underpinnings that are weird, ugly and twisted.

 

That tactic applies to the cinematic language that the director has concocted for this project. It’s both very much like one of his movies, and not at all like any of his movies. It’s epic in scale, but intimate on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s shot in 70mm, but consists largely of close-ups, which gives the performances a shocking intimacy.

 

(A second viewing is highly recommended, if only to savor the drama now that you know how it all turns out. I think I enjoyed the movie three times as much the second time around.)

 

There is a kind of elevated filmmaking that’s extremely rare, when a director connects with the material, works well with actors and non-actors alike, and is given enough time to develop the screenplay and rehearse with the cast and then re-write the script and then rehearse more and then shoot and cut the scene, and it doesn’t feel like you’re watching a scene in a movie, it feels like you’re in a big dark room and a shutter has opened and you’re getting a view into a real place where actual human beings are having actual interactions. There is nothing more interesting than that. If you live in a city, you could be sitting in your apartment watching the greatest movie ever made, but if the couple across the alley starts having a fight, you will instinctively turn off your lights and the movie and you watch them instead. If you can get something approaching the feeling of “actual humans interacting” on film, it’s a miracle. Altman did it a lot. Mike Leigh made it his life’s work. Paul Thomas Anderson has done it a lot. This movie does it all the time. The characters are both slightly exaggerated and extremely grounded, shockingly real.

 

The three acts tell an accelerated timeline: the first act takes place over a number of years, the second over a couple of weeks maybe, and the third in less than a day. As the tempo increases, the sense of time expands, climaxing in that most American of film conventions, a car chase through the desert, shot using such a unique cinematic vocabulary that it is sure to become a classic sequence on the scale of the shootout at the end of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, or the chase through the desert at the end of Greed, or, for that matter, the climax of The Godfather.

 

I thought a lot about The Godfather while watching One Battle After Another, because One Battle After Another is a “futuristic-dystopia thriller” in exactly the same way The Godfather is a “gangster movie.” Epic in scale, intimate in scenework. The scene in The Godfather where Clemenza shows Mike how to use a gun? One Battle After Another is full of scenes like that, intimate moments that, when tied together, create a much, much larger drama, all referencing a world we do not see onscreen. We don’t see it because it looks just like our own world.

 

I also thought a lot about Kubrick. Like him, Paul Thomas Anderson tends to structure his screenplays in big chunks. One large section will delineate one process, then the next large section will delineate another process, and it’s only when you understand the large, over-arching structure of the piece that you understand why the smaller sections were structured the way they were. For instance, the first act of Full Metal Jacket shows the process of “how does the Marine Corps turn individual men into heartless killing machines?” and then the second act has a completely different tone and feel, taking in a much larger, more complex world, one that seems only tangentially related to the first act, and it’s only in the third act, the whole sequence in Hue City with the sniper, that the logic of the two preceding acts comes into focus. Or, for that matter, you have 2001, where the first act shows a bunch of monkeys fighting over a waterhole, and then suddenly Act II is about a guy on a routine journey to the Moon. It’s only after taking in the whole narrative (and Kubrick throws a LOT of curveballs at you) that you understand how the first act leads to the second, and how the “questions” raised in Act Four (Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite) are easily answered, if you’ve been paying attention (and have maybe watched it a half-dozen times). There were times when it felt like Altman was shooting a Kubrick script. I mean that as a very good thing.

 

Anyway, it is a new American epic, both a grand adventure and a riveting drama, a witty dystopic action thriller and probably the movie of the decade.