Who Gets the Oscar?

One Battle After Another a film by Paul Thomas Anderson.  With Teyanna Taylor, Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Benito del Toro.  *****

It isn’t just that the plot of One Battle After Another, which is utterly absurd, reflects our own current situation perfectly.  It isn’t just that the movie includes one great performance after another, every performance perfect in its own way, so you hardly know which one is best.  It isn’t just that the suspense of the movie is excruciating and doesn’t end until the last moment (and doesn’t end then, somehow).  It is also that, despite being a terrifying drama about life in this country, in which everything seems unfair and stacked in favor of people with money and power, it is somehow a hopeful movie, to the point where you want to say, yes, this is the way life is, yet it’s all somehow beautiful.  It’s not going to get better.  It may get worse.  It’s still beautiful.

Perfidia (Teyanna Taylor) and Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) are a mixed-race couple in a revolutionary group called the French 75.  They believe in violence, though not in indiscriminate killing (Perfidia has a great chance to kill the movie’s major villain as the movie opens but doesn’t do so.  She humiliates him instead).  They’re trying to rescue people who are being held in immigration camps, but also just to disrupt things in general.  As they do so, they’re so sexually charged—she in particular—that they’re constantly touching, caressing, kissing; it’s sexy and ridiculous all at once.  Perfidia is part of a family of lifetime revolutionaries, all women, who aren’t sure that Bob has what it takes.  But he seems just as dedicated as she, if a little klutzy.  And when they have a daughter, he’s devoted to her as few fathers ever are.  Perfidia not so much.

The man she was humiliating, Colonel Steven K. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), is the enforcer of much of the anti-immigration activity.  He’s almost a parody of an uptight white guy; he walks as if he has a pole up his ass, his face is constantly twitching, and he dresses like a Sixties prep school kid (blue blazer and khaki pants, white shirt with a tie).  He is ostensibly racist but has a secret thing for black women, which Perfidia seems to recognize (the way she humiliates him in that first scene—in a moment that will be forever engraved in film history—is by making him get a hard-on and walk around).  He eventually catches her red-handed in her revolutionary activity, but she saves herself, it seems, by having sex with him (dominating him, actually), so she winds up in a witness protection program.  Eventually she escapes Bob and is on the lam.

Fast forward sixteen years.  Perfidia’s daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) is living with her father and going to high school, also studying karate with a Latino man named Sergio St. Carlos whom everyone refers to as Sensei (Benito del Toro).  The overall situation in the country hasn’t changed; the same basic struggle exists.  But while Willa seems smart and extremely capable, Bob is a mess; he apparently never got over his wife’s disappearance (he’s told Willa her mother is dead) and stays high constantly, on one drug or another.  We can hardly believe he functions.  When Lockjaw finds where they are and comes to get them both, Willa is rescued by one of her mother’s compatriots, a woman named Deandra (Regina Hall), but Bob is so spaced out he doesn’t remember the elaborate code words that the French 75 use to identify other members.  He wants to find his daughter but can’t remember the magic word.

By this time we have learned more about the two sides.  In addition to the French 75, which includes both blacks and whites, the group on the left includes an extremely organized movement among the Latinos, who are in no way surprised to be in this battle; they’ve been fighting it for centuries.  Sensei St. Carlos seems to be their extremely organized leader, despite the oddness of his being a karate instructor, and he continually teaches battle lessons, encouraging people to stay cool and keep breathing.  There is also a group of black nuns who grow marijuana and call themselves the Order of the Sacred Beaver (indeed).  On the other side is an equally organized group of lethal whites called the Christian Adventurers Club, who have strict standards for membership[1] and are brutal almost beyond belief.  Ah, Christianity.

So the second part has its own plot, the French 75 trying to protect Willa, the haplessly klutzy Bob (he seems to be wearing a bathrobe) trying through his drug-fueled haze to find her, Sensei trying to help Bob while protecting his own people with an elaborate system—a “kind of Harriet Tubman situation”—from the raiders, and particularly from the vengeance of Lockjaw, who gets weirder and weirder.  The suspense is terrific: we have no feeling that this movie will have a happy ending or any idea what that would be.

What surprised me the most was my emotional reaction to this bizarre story, which nevertheless has an absolute ring of truth and seems, if anything, less absurd than what is going on in our country right now.  What we all hope for, of course, is some ultimate solution, the other side wiped out forever, people living in peace, joy, and harmony.  This movie says, essentially, what are you, nuts, but also shows us various small groups who are doing exactly that.  Apparently the title comes from a screed by the Weather Underground, but in the context of our current world it lets us know that this struggle will never be over, it will keep getting more lethal, there is an element of desperation to both sides, and yet, in the midst of all that, it is possible to live sanely with a reasonable group of people.  That’s what I hope to do.  And this movie encourages me.

My wife, incidentally, had an overwhelming argument to answer the question I ask in my title.  Sean Penn, hands down.  She has me convinced.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes the other way.

[1] Being straight white Christian males; never having had sexual relations with anyone who isn’t a white Christian female; no history of any mental health treatment (either therapy or medications); and no recent debt collection records.