A Constant Visual Feast

I’m hardwired to receive movies that in any way broach the subject of parenthood through my dad lens. You could argue that One Battle After Another, a movie about radicalism that is itself in many ways a radical act – consider the centering of Teyana Taylor’s militant leftist character in the first 45 minutes to start; continue with the emergence of a migrant underground railroad in its second half, thereabouts – is least of all a movie about fathers. But two of its key characters, played by Leo and Sean Penn, are vying for, respectively, custodianship and possession over Chase Infiniti, who plays the daughter of either one or the other of those characters; we’re not sure which until very late in the story.

This basic instinctive experience of humanity grounds One Battle After Another, a film about a very ungrounded man in Leo’s erstwhile revolutionary, whose attempts at affecting his old ways as a soldier of the American resistance read as pathetic on purpose in its present tense. Anderson quietly reminds him, and us, of basic compassion and empathy as the reasons one fights injustice and tyranny in the first place – and then ties all of that back, just as quietly, to what is ultimately a narrative about a struggling dad hauling ass across California to recover his only child from the hands of authoritarian brutes. 

In other words, this is a staggering, beautiful movie, and for me a nice recovery from the distended hangout movie Licorice Pizza, which I did not care for. You can read my full review over at Paste Magazine.