Review: Paul Thomas Anderson's 'One Battle After Another'

Vague Visages’ One Battle After Another review contains minor spoilers. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 movie features Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Few directors wear their influences on their sleeves as openly as Paul Thomas Anderson; only his friend Quentin Tarantino even comes up in the conversation when discussing major auteurs whose distinctive styles are built entirely from overt homage. But whereas Tarantino’s philosophies and quirks can often be heard pouring out of the mouths of his characters in each fast-paced dialogue exchange, you’d be hard pressed to find any similar example of Anderson placing himself in the shoes of genre movie protagonists he grew up idolizing. He’s a San Fernando Valley native who, up until this point, appears to have suggested that the film with the closest personal correlation to his life is the London-set Phantom Thread (2017), which he’s characterized as a romantic comedy loosely inspired by the time his wife (the actress Maya Rudolph) looked after him when he came down with the flu. It’s a period drama set in the 1950s fashion world in which the uptight protagonist’s partner poisons him with mushrooms so he won’t take her caring for granted. Unsurprisingly, a direct autobiography is something Anderson’s work has frequently proved he couldn’t be less interested in.

With One Battle After Another, Anderson uses the skeleton of Thomas Pynchon’s satirical 1990 novel Vineland — an expansive tale about a group of 1960s American idealists being targeted in a sting operation — to tell what appears to be his most nakedly personal tale to date. Updating the novel’s setting to a California that could either be a post-Donald Trump dystopia or a snapshot of any period following the paranoid outbreak of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the rallying cries of its leftist revolutionary protagonists are less impactful than the family drama it’s all grounded within. The reason many have been quick to embrace a film with very purposefully divisive politics is the overriding sentiment of a father (Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, in another stellar performance likely to be underrated) reckoning with his daughter’s safety in an authoritarian world he wasn’t powerful enough to stop coming into being. That this is a white father with a biracial daughter whose life experiences will be more difficult than he can immediately comprehend suggests that, even if Bob is far from a director surrogate, he’s a fleshed-out personification of Anderson’s own parental anxieties as a father of mixed-race children. The director may often hide his emotions under the veil of homage; however, with One Battle After Mother, he’s never been more openly sentimental, at least since his 1999 film Magnolia.

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