The American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson (“Magnolia”) is not exactly considered a assembly line director. If he does something, he takes time – including his new work “One Battle After Another”. 20 years ago, he started working on the story for the film, reports the cineaste favorite. Knowledge of this generous time budget in the head is all the more pronounced, which is in the cinema armchair during the approximately two and a half hours. The film looks scary – like a real -time comment on the America of Donald Trump.
With a star contingent surrounding Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro, Anderson tells the history of militant left-wing activists who see themselves as revolutionary movement, especially of self-confident black women. In an authoritarian society enforced by racists, they mobilize against abortion bans and – it is now interesting – free borders demand.
Right in the opening scene, the Revoluzzer team storms a US camp on the Mexican border and frees migrants locked up there. You don’t have to know much about Trump’s migration policy (“I will send troops to the southern border of the United States to ward off the catastrophic invasion to our country”) in order to connect pictures to the current political weather situation.
Baby bottle instead of revolution
The amazing thing is that the director doesn’t necessarily do it. In essence, he tells a family history in a wild whisk from action, comedy and drama elements.
DiCaprio plays the badly rocked revolutionary Bob with greasy hair. For the activist group, he once worked on explosive sets. Above all, he was with one of her pioneers, called Perfidia – and played fascinating by Teyana Taylor. When a child gets a child, the paths separate. She opts for world revolution, he for diapers. When a campaign of the RAF-like group is terribly escalated and Perfidia is caught, Bob dipped somewhere in the vastness of America and begins a decades of existence between alcohol, paranoia and paternal concerns.
The past catches up with him when an old arch enemy suddenly begins to hunt him. Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw – played by Sean Penn – was once on duty when the left group opened the migrant camp near Mexico. From the humiliation, he developed a strange, also sexually connoted obsession with Bob’s ex-girlfriend Perfidia. In general, you can say that the film has a lot of spice, as you say. Sex plays an important role. An old thought: the private is political.
Between Christmas and racist buddy
Penn in particular runs up to top form and plays his colonel like a Gi Joe from steroids. With a bizarre muscular upper arms, brush cuts and fridge gang, he tries to influence the course of things in his sense. Actually a joke figure, he can rose quickly, also due to a sinister men’s association who, on the one hand, has a strange fascination for sweet Christmas traditions (“Christmas Adventurers Club”), on the other hand consists of tough racists.
From the many topics (politics, family, sex, religion, fanaticism, paranoia, surveillance) and genres (drama, action, satire), Anderson develops a barely sortable but multi -layered and massive film with outstanding actors, which can only be accused that he is crushing himself up at his strong pictures and has gotten an hour too long.
Anderson wanted to focus on timeless
It would also be wrong to say that he strikes up on one side politically. Rather, “One Battle After Another” – what sounds a bit like the stone -old footballer saying “after the game is before the game” – the absurdities of political extremes. Not only the racists of the Christmas club seem ridiculous, but also the revolutionary group, which is almost serious, which seems to be forgotten at some point that it is about humans.
Anderson himself claims that he wanted to tell the current world events with difficulty overview and therefore rather timelessly. The end comes – without revealing too much – almost obscene kitschy and unbelievable. But somehow encouraging, because nothing is lost at first. After the game is before the game – hopefully that also applies to the world run.
