“One Battle After Another” wins the war

The first imperative is to ground the political drama in an intimate one, using engaging characters not mouthpieces. Mr Anderson does.

The wrong hero. The wrong villain. The wrong sort of emergency—or, even worse, exactly the right kind. With their elephantine lead times, glitzy films that aspire to political relevance are liable to look dated by the time they hit the screen. Or, if a movie features, say, a terrorist attack, and its release coincides with one, the story can seem prescient but the taste rotten. Chasing the news is like hunting lightning: if they don’t miss, directors can wind up being incinerated.

Leonardo DiCaprio in a still from One Battle After Another

Poor timing is only one of the risks run by “One Battle After Another”, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film. Any movie with a political edge can scythe off half its potential audience in advance. If the politics are blunt, punters who do turn up may wish they hadn’t. Mr Anderson sidesteps these dangers as his shambolic protagonist dodges his.

The first imperative is to ground the political drama in an intimate one, using engaging characters not mouthpieces. Mr Anderson does. His jolting opening portrays a revolutionary cell called the French 75, who, in a slightly distorted America, plant bombs, rob banks and bust migrants out of detention. Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, a black firebrand; Leonardo DiCaprio (pictured) is Pat, the lover in her thrall.

A seam of daddy issues runs through Mr Anderson’s work, from “Magnolia” to “The Master”—and Mr DiCaprio’s main persona in this film is father rather than rebel. Most of the action unfolds 16 years after the French 75’s spree. Perfidia has bolted, leaving a daughter whom Pat, now a washed-up stoner, ineptly strives to protect from the blowback of the past. The personal is political, but also trumps it, especially (as often happens) with age.

If a successful political movie is more than an arid allegory, neither can it be a polemic. It must see more than one side, if only glancingly. Here the enemy is a lawless military crackpot, Steven Lockjaw (a show-stealing Sean Penn). The plot, loosely adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”, is driven by his yearnings. One is his lust for Perfidia, a fixation that ickily gestures at a long record of racial predation and typecasting. The other is his yen to join an elite white-supremacist cabal. With his insecurity and self-loathing, he is almost but not quite a hateful cartoon.

As for the radicals: a critic in the National Review alleged that they romanticise assassinations, making this “the year’s most irresponsible movie”. That is unfair. Lethal violence proves squalid and ruinous; their campaign fizzles out in betrayal and disillusionment. The moral centre is instead an equable karate instructor (Benicio del Toro), who calmly helps the needy without blowing anything up.

“Human kind”, wrote T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.” He might have added, “at the cinema”. Good political films entertain first and educate lightly. Thrillers are an amenable form, the clock ticking and the stakes high. The anguish of migration is the context of “One Battle After Another”, but in the foreground is a breathless series of shoot-outs, rooftop flights and car chases, powered by a fiery soundtrack.

Like “Dr Strangelove” or “The Death of Stalin”, it is also very funny, using satire and silliness seriously. As well as being sinister, the villains are preposterous. So is Mr DiCaprio’s flailing has-been, who careens around California in a dressing-gown—a visual gag that lasts long enough for you to stop noticing it, then remember and find it funny again. In an extended joke about customer-service purgatory, he struggles to recall the passwords when he phones the underground’s hotline, angrily demanding to speak to a supervisor.

Thus the film makes you both laugh and care—a tricky feat—even as it makes its points about migrants, militarisation and idealism. And unlike shouty tales of seismic events, it conjures a sense of grand scale through its look and form. Hurtling around the epic scenery of the south-west it also races through genres, from action flick to caper and buddy movie, with a touch of pastiche Western. The medley implies that the zany adventure is a compendium of America.

Imagery underscores the ambition. Characters enter ordinary buildings—a suburban home, a shop—which open out into huge annexes and hidden tunnels, a hint that the film’s battles are quietly raging all around. And in its last breakneck car chase, the vehicles pursue each other along a dipping desert road, up and down hillocks and up again, as if tracing the endless undulations of history. The contest between liberty and repression, the dreamy sequence suggests, is a never-ending story.

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