Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
What do you get when you give $130-175 million to a filmmaker who, after nearly 30 years in the business, has never helmed a blockbuster, or even a movie that grossed more than $41 million domestic? If you're Warner Bros., which granted a nine-figure budget to Paul Thomas Anderson, you probably get all sorts of happy, because the writer/director's new screwball epic One Battle After Another is going through the roof in every imaginable way. Better still, it deserves to.
As of this writing, PTA's latest is standing with a 96-percent “freshness” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 95-percent approval on Metacritic. (Those are Pulp Fiction numbers, and the comparison is apt.) The film is widely considered the new Academy Awards front-runner in Best Picture, Directing, and several other categories. (A second Oscar for Leonardo DiCaprio? A third for Sean Penn?) It's the first Anderson to nab an “A” grade with the marketing firm CinemaScore … though because it's one of the director's few titles to enjoy a wide release, it's also only the fourth of his 10 features that were ranked by CinemaScore, which has been historically unkind to the auteur. (Boogie Nights got a “C,” Magnolia a “C-minus,” and Punch-Drunk Love a “D-plus.”) And the box-office for this pricey entertainment is thus-far promising, with an opening weekend of $22.4 million domestic and $48.5 global. It'll still take some doing – an estimated $150 mil more – for One Battle After Another to score a profit. But given the acclaim and word of mouth, especially as we head into awards season, it could certainly happen.
I usually wouldn't spend quite so much wordage on factors that, in the end, don't really have anything to do with the movie as an experience. Yet I'm highlighting the work's rapturous reception and awards prospects because they largely mirror the experience itself; you leave PTA's obscenely enjoyable comic thriller on such a high of filmmaking bravado, narrative ingenuity, and performance pleasure that you don't want to – you practically can't – come down from it. Is this, as many have suggested, Anderson's (to-date) masterpiece? I dunno. There Will Be Blood makes a major case for the title, and on a personal level, at least for now, I still prefer Magnolia and Boogie Nights, and perhaps even Phantom Thread. With PTA, though, you're never simply talking apples and oranges. You're talking apples and oranges and pears and grapes and pomegranates … . While they may fit together under a general grouping, their flavors are completely distinct. And One Battle After Another, which sometimes shifts organically from terror to poignancy to hilarity within the same scene, is as distinct as they come. It's utterly bananas.
Although no specific years are referenced in the California-set adventure, which Anderson freely adapted from Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, all of the action appears to take place in the present. That means the opening half-hour or so either takes place in 2009, with the other two hours and change spent in 2025, or the extended prelude is a 2025 world, and the main events are happening in 2041. Or some 16-year variation on those dates. It doesn't matter. One Battle After Another is always undeniably now.
A simplistic synopsis would go something like this. Bob Ferguson (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are members of the far-left resistance group the French 75, whose revolutionaries frequently employ violence in their fights against immigrant detention, anti-abortion politicians, and the banking industry. Bob and Perfidia are deeply in love. During an early detention-center raid, Perfidia pointedly humiliates commanding officer Steven Lockjaw (Penn). Embarrassed yet turned on, Lockjaw gets his revenge after Perfidia is arrested, and he guarantees her freedom in exchange for sex. Nine months later, Perfidia is nine-months pregnant. A few months after that, Perfidia is on the run, and Bob and their infant Willa are forced into hiding. Sixteen years after that, Bob is a miserable, paranoid stoner in a flannel bathrobe. The far-more-collected Willa (Chase Infiniti) is heading to a school dance. Lockjaw, for deeply unsettling yet riotous reason, is fixated on hunting down and potentially eliminating both of them. And as Bob and Lockjaw, upon learning that Willa vanished from the dance, individually attempt to find the girl and other forces attempt to keep her safe, there are significant detours involving a kindly karate sensei (Benicio del Toro), a sanctuary-city tunnel system, a convent of revolutionary nuns, and a white-supremacist organization – the Christmas Adventurers Club – who greet one another with “Hail St. Nick!”
Yes. That was the simplistic synopsis.
Yet while One Battle After Another's 162 minutes frequently zip by with a speed that leaves you breathless, you never feel left in the lurch. Anderson and his glorious ensemble keep the motives of every character, including the walk-ons, crystal clear, and even when it takes a few beats to comprehend certain game plans, the director's masterful control of tone alleviates your momentary confusion. PTA is brazenly confident in his staging choices, pacing, and choreography – there are routines here, as well as full sequences, you want to talk about for hours. (That unhelpful phone contact! That 40-foot drop from the rooftop! That nerve-shredding climactic chase! ) It's the brilliance with which Anderson blends the film's dichotomous elements, though, that really makes you want to applaud. By turns, and over and over, One Battle is exciting and riotous and angry and scary and sweet and pessimistic and weirdly hopeful. If it had vampires and songs, it'd practically be Sinners.
If I have a caveat in the wake of a lone viewing (so far), it's that I wish I got more from the movie's chief emotional hook. Despite DiCaprio's and Infiniti's excellence, Bob's and Willa's conflicted relationship felt more like a conceit than genuine attachment and affection; their familial love story, intellectually moving and well-acted though it was, left me kinda cold. That, however, proves to be a surprisingly minor issue in a film boasting this much directorial and authorial power, this superlative a creative team (cinematographer Michael Bauman, editor Andy Jurgensen, composer Jonny Greenwood …), and this many astounding portrayals.
Penn, doing his finest work since 2008's Milk, delivers cartoon aggression that's legitimately fearsome (and very funny), and Taylor provides righteousness and sex appeal, and DiCaprio, bless him, brings the Jeff Lebowski. But amid their deserved praise, I hope people don't forget about del Toro's beautiful, shrewd underplaying, and Infiniti's preternatural poise and barely buried fire, and Regina Hall's heartbreaking soulfulness as a fellow French 75 foot soldier. I hope they take time to appreciate the sterling contributions of less-prominent talents including John Hoogenakker, Wood Harris, April Grace, Shayna McHayle, James Raterman, and the perfectly cast Tony Goldwyn. (How has that man not aged a minute since Ghost?!) And I hope they realize that the staggeringly entertaining One Battle After Another, whenever it's precisely set, is a Movie of the Moment like few others have ever been – and one that, partly because of that, is likely to endure for generations.
THE STRANGERS: CHAPTER 2
If director Renny Harlin's horror continuation The Strangers: Chapter 2 is about anything beyond making a few easy bucks for Lionsgate, it's about a gal who, for the life of her, can't get decent cell reception.
As the Last Girl Standing at the end of last May's reboot – and was it really only 16 months ago that I previously endured this dreck? – Madelaine Petsch's Maya was hospitalized following the rental-home invasion that left her badly scarred and her fiancé Ryan (Froy Gutierrez) dead. As Harlin's sequel begins, the three lunatics responsible are now at the hospital ready to finish what they started, and Maya knows they're around. So she escapes her room with her phone. No signal. (In a hospital, where you'd think telephonic communication might be important.) Several attempted executions later, Maya finds herself at a neighboring ranch. No signal. Several attempted executions after that, including one by a vicious wild boar (!!!), she's eventually picked up on the roadside by a quartet of potentially sinister townies who share a spacious, fully modernized hilltop dwelling. Maya gets there, and guess what. No signal. I can't imagine this series becoming so gonzo that Maya herself turns into a murderous fiend. But if she wanted to enact revenge against whichever company set her up with that shitty phone, I'd certainly empathize.
Dull, stagnant, personality challenged, fright free, and deeply unnecessary as a redo of Bryan Bertino's low-rent shocker that I did and would still place on my 2008 10-favorites list, the 2024 version of The Strangers was truly awful. This one is a little bit worse. I gotta give that wild boar some of the credit. When this hilariously CGI creature first appeared, hell-bent on annihilating Maya in the middle of the woods, it took considerable energy to not roar with unembarrassed glee; it was like watching The Lion King's Pumbaa recast as the bear fromThe Revenant. But that sequence's unbridled silliness still accounted for more legitimate fun that I got from the rest of the movie, which replicates all of its predecessor's failings while providing almost nothing fresh to counter them. Maya is still a cipher and Petsch is still acting as if in a particularly tedious soap opera. The “threatening” locals are still blandly inhospitable. The sound cues are still blasting our eardrums despite nothing scary requiring them. The burlap- and porcelain-masked psychopaths are still doing their thing without the sufficient filmmaking style to make any of it memorable. (In the '90s, his résumé largely clogged by losers including The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and Cliffhanger and Cutthroat Island, Renny Harlin was widely considered a hack. Now he's a three-decades-older hack.)
Beyond the boar, and arguably the sight of Gutierrez as the world's first morgue corpse whose eyes are left wide open, the one nod to novelty that screenwriters Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland extend in The Strangers: Chapter 2 turns out to be – sigh … – an origin story. In it, we kinda-sorta learn what prompted the three Oregon hill people to become masked savages, with several flashbacks to the characters as children suggesting that all three were schooled at Bad Seed Elementary. To be fair, it was nice to finally learn who the Tamara from “Is Tamara home?” fame actually is/was. Then again, the psychological reasoning behind the Strangers' descent into madness is so generic and unsound – seriously … a playground slighting?! – that nothing is gained by attempting to turn these freaks into humans, especially when it forces this sequel to end on a note of such misguided, unconvincing pathos. Because all three works in Harlin's planned trilogy were filmed simultaneously, box office be damned, we're due for yet another Strangers by the end of 2026. But by this point, the only thing that'd surprise or amuse me in part three would be if Burlap Guy removed his mask and revealed himself to be a Verizon representative sadistically angry at Maya for refusing to switch from AT&T.
DEAD OF WINTER
The scares aren't necessarily more plentiful, but the company is definitely more welcome, in Dead of Winter, director Brian Kirk's rather literal chiller set in the midst of a fiercely cold season in upper Minnesota, and starring Emma Thompson as Marge Gunderson.
Okay, that's a lie. She's not really playing Fargo's police chief. (Until the movie's final minutes, we don't know what her character's name is.) But yes, British-to-her-teeth Thompson is indeed employing a “You betcha ya-a-ah” accent as a stalwart senior who stumbles upon a kidnapping – a woman who mutters “Uff da!” so many times that she's practically doing Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days as a solo vehicle. With Nicholas Jacobson-Larson and Dalton Leeb screenwriting, Kirk's outing is pretty stupidly plotted, and features more than its share of annoying contrivances. (A dropped gun, a dropped mitten … how do people not see these dropped items on top of all that snow?) Thompson, however, makes the film worthwhile. Having Judy Greer around as her chief nemesis makes it almost unmissable.
With Greer listed in the credits as “Purple Lady” based on her unnamed villain's quite-attractive snowsuit, she and the equally excellent Marc Menchaca (as “Camo Jacket”), in their ramshackle backwoods cabin, have abducted Laurel Marsden's teenage Leah for sinister and grisly purposes best left unrevealed. After getting lost on her way to an ice-fishing destination, only Thompson's resilient recent widow can save the girl. If you're a fellow fan of Thompson and Greer, you probably don't need more than that, which is a good thing, because we don't get much more than that. The narrative is routinely interrupted, none too subtly, by flashbacks involving the widow and her late husband Karl as 20-somethings in love (played by Cúán Hosty-Blaney and Thompson's real-life daughter Gaia Wise, who occasionally resembles her mom to an eerie degree). But Dead of Winter is essentially a four-person show, and Kirk derives a considerable amount of tension from his bare-bones conceit, mostly because you're more invested in its heroine's survival than you generally are in these sorts of things.
Beyond being an Academy Award-winning icon and international treasure, let's face it, folks: Emma Thompson is 66. For comparison, Maggie Smith was 66 when she filmed her first Harry Potter, and not a single one of the Golden Girls – not even Estelle Getty! – was 66 when their sitcom started its run. Emma Thompson doesn't need to be firing shotguns and getting punched in the gut and cauterizing and stitching up the bullet hole in her arm. That she's doing all that anyway, purely for our questionable entertainment, is the hallmark of a legend. And although her dialect may sometimes make you giggle in the wrong way, she's fiercely present and committed to this lurid nonsense, just as Greer, who usually brightens every project she's in, is terrifyingly dialed in to her profane, deranged loon with an omnipresent fentanyl lollipop in her mouth. (Between this role and her anguished mom in The Last Walk, it's been quite the difficult fall for we fans of Greer's reliable cheer.) Beautifully shot, in Finnish and German locales, by cinematographer Christopher Ross, Dead of Winter has its moments, but remains slight, silly, and not altogether satisfying. It also has Emma Thompson and Judy Greer. Skip it if you must. But you really mustn't.
ELEANOR THE GREAT
If it's rare to see a 66-year-old woman headlining, and kicking ass in, a major motion picture, it's even rarer – unprecedented, probably? – to see a 94-year-old woman doing the same. So can we please have an insane round of applause for June Squibb, who, less than a year-and-a-half after her divine turn in and as Thelma, is back for leading-lady duties in Eleanor the Great? Weirdly, even though it's a warmhearted dramedy, Scarlett Johansson's feature-film debut has a lot in common with Dead of Winter: both are awkwardly dependent on contrivance; both augment their themes with intrusive flashbacks; both narratives find elder characters essentially saving the lives, either physically or spiritually, of much-younger females. But also like Dead of Winter, Eleanor the Great finds its star transcending her material through conviction, pluck, and a lifetime of acting resources that make an otherwise iffy movie not just a treat, but a genuine occasion. Had the title been changed to June the Great, no one would've batted an eye.
Although the incident that gets Johansson's and screenwriter Tory Kamen's plot in motion is unquestionably sitcommy, it's an unusually loaded sitcom situation, in that it directly concerns the Holocaust. A widow who has spent the last 11 years residing happily in Florida with her lifelong bestie Bessie (a wondrous Rita Zohar), Squibb's Eleanor is forced to relocate to New York after her friend's passing, where she'll live, for as long as she can stand, with her well-meaning daughter (Jessica Hecht). On an afternoon trip to a senior center, Eleanor mistakenly walks into a group meeting for Holocaust survivors. But although, embarrassed to be there, she initially tries to leave – Eleanor being a protestant Des Moines native who married into Judaism in the 1950s – she's encouraged to stay and tell her story of survival. And tell it she does … only it's Bessie's story, which Eleanor shares by pretending that Bessie's experiences were her own. This kind of mistaken-identity subterfuge is the stuff of sitcom. (It was recently employed, in similarly discomforting fashion, for James Sweeney's Twinless.) But as much as Roberto Benigni may have tried to convince us otherwise, there is nothing funny about the Holocaust, which grows even more apparent as the enormity of Eleanor's little white lie snowballs.
There are elements of Kamen's script that I'm not crazy about. The means by which NYU writing student Nina (Erin Kellyman) becomes Eleanor's confidante and eventual road to local fame are uncomfortably forced, as is the discovery that the news reporter that Eleanor and Bessie worshiped in Florida (an underused Chiwetel Ejiofor) is, coincidentally enough, Nina's father. (Now there's some sitcom for ya.) And while Squibb delivers her zingers like the pro she is, Kamen overindulges in the cutesy Grandma Knows Best comedy, with many of Eleanor's bits – including a lengthy dressing-down to a blasé grocery-store employee – sounding more than practiced routines than spontaneous wit. Squibb continually scores her chuckles; I just wish they didn't feel quite so programmed.
But Johannson's gentle, charming meditation on aging and delayed, potentially misapplied grief becomes more quietly severe as it progresses, especially once you fully realize that, as in Twinless, no good can possibly come from our lead following through on such a seemingly thoughtless lie – until, miraculously, some good actually does. Although Johansson's direction isn't (yet) visually distinctive, she produces a warm, welcoming tone that keeps you in the film's corner even when its particulars have you rolling your eyes. Plus, unsurprisingly, she appears wonderfully connected to actors, granting the ever-marvelous Hecht the space to be both believably harried and exquisitely tender in what could've been a stock antagonist role, and revealing Kellyman to be a naturalistic wonder; she's never better than when engaging with Squibb is moments that are clearly, delightfully off-script.
As for Squibb herself, what's left to say? Her mere presence is almost unspeakably inspiring, and her transcendently beautiful performance as Eleanor the Great is rich, layered, and exceptionally moving, even when she's making us laugh out loud. At the 2014 Golden Globes, co-host Tina Fey scanned the talents in attendance, and notched Robert Redford as the coolest celebrity in the room, citing June Squibb as a close second. All respect to Redford, but I think he'd be happy knowing that Fey's “coolest in the room” ranking, in the wake of his passing, is in safe and deserving hands.
