My favorite thing in One Battle After Another is Jim Downey’s performance as a shitty, racist, rich white man who’s part of a shadowy organization of other shitty, racist, rich white men called the Christmas Adventurers Club. There’s a scene near the end where he has only one line: “A semen demon?” and he delivers it so brilliantly. Fully aware that it’s an absurdly silly punchline, but also fully aware of exactly why it works.
That’s not my favorite of his scenes; I really liked his first scene in the movie, in which he’s helping induct a new member into the club. Unfortunately, I can’t remember any of the lines in that scene, in much the same way that I can’t remember conversations from my childhood so many years ago.
The movie is long, is my point. I’d read and heard many, many breathless reviews of One Battle After Another that described it as “taut” and “excellently paced” and said that it doesn’t feel like it’s almost three hours long. And I wish that I’d seen the same movie that those people did, because I needed not one but two bathroom breaks, and I’d swear that by the end of it, my beard and fingernails were visibly longer than they had been when I went in.
When I say “I wish I’d seen the same movie that they did,” it’s not just me being sarcastic. I genuinely do wish that I could’ve connected with the movie that strongly, because there’s a ton of outstanding stuff in it. Brilliant performances from every single member of the cast, with Chase Infiniti, Benicio del Toro, and Sean Penn being standouts. An approach to storytelling that lets ideas gradually unfold and weave in and out of each other in a way that feels novel, while rarely feeling too showy or “art-movie” experimental.
I can still remember the first time I saw Children of Men, and how it felt as if I was watching something that was taking command of the potential of cinema and showing me something unlike anything I’d ever seen before. There’s an entire, lengthy sequence crammed into the middle of One Battle After Another, showing DiCaprio and del Toro working their way into and then escaping from a safe house for immigrants, all while a riot is taking place on the streets outside. And it doesn’t feel as if the movie is offering up a set piece or a showcase, but simply that we’re following the action as it happens. It was only after the sequence was over that I appreciated just how much had gone into it.
I can also remember the first time I saw The Untouchables, and being struck by how it seemed to break from bullet-heavy, hyper-violent action movies at the time by showing the real damage that bullets (or a baseball bat) could do to human bodies. One Battle After Another isn’t anywhere near as gory, but there was a sequence where the revolutionary group is falling apart that suddenly shocked me back into being extremely aware of gun violence. Characters we’d become familiar with are dispassionately taken out without warning, and I felt every shot.
And even though it rarely feels like it’s drawing attention to its own filmmaking, there are moments that take deliberate and purposeful control over the camera. An extended car chase over rolling hills through the desert, seen from a camera that seems to be mounted on the front of the pursuing car and dangerously too close to the road. Or my favorite: a very short shot where Infiniti’s character hurriedly gets into a car, and we see it from a camera that seems to be mounted onto the door as she slams it and begins driving away.
All of that is without mentioning how well it handles issues that are depressingly relevant. There are several scenes showing the plight of immigrants being detained or in hiding — as well as citizens who just happen to not be white — and they’re presented matter-of-factly, urgent without being didactic. The movie doesn’t need to tell you that this shit is injustice; any human being with a soul can recognize that. I thought the most effective parts of the movie had a high school dance being interrupted by camo-wearing military, or even more than that, scenes of kids who refuse to get off their smart phones even while an urgent crisis is going on around them.
The idea should be clear to white, middle-class audiences like myself: these aren’t inscrutable aliens to be seen and pitied from a comfortable distance; they’re human beings just like everyone else, simply trying to live their lives in peace.
Which leads back into the scenes with the Christmas Adventurers Club, and Downey’s performance in particular. Most of the recognizable actors in One Battle After Another dispense with their usual, recognizable mannerisms and disappear into their roles. (And Sean Penn completely transforms into a bigoted psychopath with a distinct and unnerving set of facial tics and a manner of walking that seems as if he’s unable to move all of his joints). Downey distinctly doesn’t do that; I think his performance works so well for me specifically because I was aware the entire time that this was Jim Downey, and I’m a particular fan of his writing and work with SNL.
His scenes are surreal and absurd, introducing a self-appointed Illuminati of rich, entitled, white men in positions of power, pulling the strings while being openly racist, misogynist, and out of touch, all while sharing ridiculous Christmas-themed oaths and secret knocks. Tony Goldwyn’s character describes the group as being “better than other humans,” and he manages to deliver it not just as bigotry, but as if it’s a solemn responsibility. A true believer in the White Man’s Burden.
And Jim Downey seems to delight in showing complete contempt for these clueless, awful, white men by portraying one of them. Showing us the absurd banality of their evil; they’re hopelessly dated, out-of-touch, and buffoonish. Capable of perpetrating very real harm, but they don’t deserve our fear, just our mockery. It never feels like he’s winking at the camera, but it always feels like he’s deliberately showing the audience what a real asshole looks and sounds like, and enjoying every second of it.
I get the sense that some fans of the movie would be furious with me for even mentioning that there’s a shadow organization in the movie, and that I’m spoiling one of the biggest plot revelations. But I really want people who’d be open to this movie to go see it, because there’s so much that it does well. And knowing that it has such a dark sense of absurd humor is exactly the kind of thing that would make it connect with me.
This is the first Paul Thomas Anderson movie that I’ve seen since Boogie Nights, which I absolutely hated. Enough to swear off any of his non-music-video work, even while everyone I knew was raving about how brilliant his films are. And even while many of my friends are huge fans of his work, while he attracts so much great talent, and while so many artists and entertainers that I like are fans of him and his work. If nothing else, this movie has convinced me to go back and watch several of his movies that I’ve missed, since it feels like an enormous cultural blind spot.
It’s entirely possible that they’ll remain movies that I can appreciate but never really connect with. But I do think that there’s a roughly two-hour-long masterpiece inside of One Battle After Another, and it just had almost an additional hour of material that didn’t work for me.
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