One Battle After Another

Judged on structure. The prologue resists the subtractive test: the night at the border makes Lockjaw’s humiliation and his desire, and the robbery makes Perfidia’s crime and her betrayal, the premise of every later pursuit, since the second part is a man trying to erase a child who may be his. The forgotten code on the telephone is required: it shows how far Pat has fallen into Bob, and why he cannot reach his network when it counts. The paternity test is the hinge. What holds the axis here is the middle: the progress through Baktan Cross repeats its comic beat, the convent runs longer than its work, and the Christmas Adventurers are explained in more scenes than they need, so part of the length is earned by momentum rather than necessity.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. The security state and private racial fantasy are one appetite: Lockjaw’s desire for Perfidia and his wish to belong to a white brotherhood are one drive, and a raid on a whole town is mounted to hide a private shame, articulated in action, not mood. A second truth is generational: the revolutionary of one decade becomes a frightened, stoned parent, the child he hid is more capable than he is, and the battle passes on unfinished. A third: Perfidia’s commitment to the cause is also a commitment to herself, and it abandons a child twice. The sanctuary town is shown rather than argued, and counts in full. What holds it at the figure: the satire on the right is broad, and Perfidia’s truth is left half told.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and the summits are kinetic rather than contemplative. The opening raid at night, carried on Jonny Greenwood’s insistent piano, has the propulsion of a march. Perfidia, heavily pregnant, firing a gun is an image of terrible exhilaration. The raid on Baktan Cross, crowds and police in the streets, rises to a civic sublime. The summit is the chase on the hill road: three cars on a road that rises and falls like a swell, each vanishing behind a crest and appearing again, pursuit felt as vertigo and dread. The close lifts quietly. Held at the figure because much of the middle is comic and level, and the elevations are mostly of motion: the film rarely reaches the stillness that lifts 2001: A Space Odyssey or Tokyo Story.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The myth is built and bears the load: a child with two fathers, one of the blood, who wants her dead, and one by love, who cannot remember the password to save her. Under it lies the oldest pattern of hidden parentage, the foundling whose origin endangers a king, and the tyrant who must kill the child to keep his place among his brothers. The hidden paternity is the engine of the second part, which is construction, not allusion. The mother who leaves for the cause is Medea turned outward; Sergio is the old master of the martial arts tale, who hides the hunted; the Adventurers are a fraternity with a ritual of purity. The particular holds: a bathrobe, a dying phone, a karate class. Held at the figure because the comic register keeps the archetypes light, and part of the myth is evoked through genre.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is triple: Anderson’s own period dramas, from There Will Be Blood to Phantom Thread; the radical and paranoid cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, with The Battle of Algiers (1966) placed inside the film as the thing Bob watches; and the studio chase picture. The turn is large. Anderson left the period chamber for the present and made an action comedy of left fugitives against a white supremacist state, at a scale no film of his had carried, in a major studio’s season. The stake was money, reputation and the exposure of a film that names immigration raids and armed nationalists in its own year. Much of the hill road’s invention belongs here. Held at the figure because the elements are inherited, Pynchon’s comic paranoia (already filmed in Inherent Vice), the Coens’ manhunt comedy, the chase film: a synthesis made at great risk, not a new grammar.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The structure is the title: a pursuit without rest, in which every escape opens another battle, and the jump of sixteen years shows the struggle passing unchanged to the next generation. The score’s relentless figure makes time a pursuit. The hill road is the form at its strongest: on a road built of crests the pursuer is unseen until near, the viewer shares the hunted’s partial sight, and the danger lies in what the land hides, a knowledge only the form could give. The VistaVision frame holds whole streets in the raids, so the town is a body rather than a backdrop. What holds it at the figure: the middle uses the comic manhunt’s inherited grammar, well rather than newly, and the prologue’s montage tells more than it forms.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Evidence is preferred to promise, and one year supplies little, so the figure is a forecast; but the questions opened at once and are argued now. Does the film celebrate the revolutionary left or satirise it? Is Perfidia, a Black woman revolutionary who betrays her comrades and leaves her child, a portrait or a charge? That is disputed. How is Lockjaw’s racial desire to be read, and what does the film take from Vineland and leave? The form invites return as well: the two raids sixteen years apart, the rhyme between the border wall and the hill road, performances that carry more on second sight. Against it stands the span: much of the year’s argument was occasioned by the politics of the year itself, and some of it may close as that moment does.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Field: the cinema of the 2020s, so force and reach are scored together, and reach is the weaker by necessity. The intrinsic force is considerable. The film shows that a studio picture of large budget can be original, adult, political and comic at once, when such budgets went almost wholly to franchises; it restores VistaVision to serious use; and it fuses the action chase with political comedy at a scale the decade had not seen. It is more a synthesis of known modes than a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a year allows no evidence of what the film redirected, its prominence on release is recorded and not weighed, and no later film can yet be shown to descend from it.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric, over one year. The film survives whole as released, with nothing lost, and its presence has been as wide as a new film’s can be, in cinemas and then at home; wide presence earns little on its own. Two things hold the axis lowest of the twelve. The first is elapsed time: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and one year demonstrates almost nothing. The second is the surface: a present of immigration raids, detention centres and armed nationalist clubs, with a satire aimed at its own year, whose edge may dull or change meaning as the moment passes. The parent’s fear and the inheritance of struggle beneath that surface are not dated, and they are what is credited.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Command of the medium, read to the anchors of every art, and the making bears weight in most departments. Michael Bauman’s photography, largely in VistaVision, is deep and clean from the night raids to the desert in long lens. Andy Jurgensen’s cutting keeps about 161 minutes moving and leaves the hill chase in long, legible takes. Greenwood’s piano figure pushes the film like a pulse. Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is absurd and frightening at once; DiCaprio’s Bob is a comedy of a body run down; Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia is magnetic in a short time on screen; Chase Infiniti, in a first lead, holds the last hour. The costs hold the figure: the slack middle, a slippage between caricature and menace in the Adventurers, and exposition laid out rather than made. The Third Man and Chinatown stand at 9.0, makings in which nearly nothing is idle.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Bob in a bathrobe on the telephone, unable to recall the code his old comrades require, and Lockjaw’s paternity test, the father of the blood confirmed in a man who seeks admission to a club of racial purity. One law governs both: authority is absurd and lethal at once, and everyone is bound to an order, the network’s protocol or the club’s rule, that does not care for him. The law holds from slapstick to the threat of rape, the killing of a guard and a child pursued to the death, and the axis rewards that width. The strain: the Adventurers sometimes lean out of the law into sketch comedy; the convent is played at another temperature; and Perfidia’s exit takes the moral centre out of the second part, so its return in the coda comes from outside the pursuit.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Many orders are held, and the pursuit integrates them, since the hunt for one girl involves the whole town and the state. The state, in the military, immigration enforcement and detention; race, in a white supremacist fraternity, Black women revolutionaries and a Latino sanctuary community; the family, with an absent mother and a second, hidden father; history, in the radical left from the bombings of one era to the protests of the next; the community, in the town’s network, a dojo and its skaters; consciousness, in Bob’s paranoia and Willa’s discovery of who she is; the sacred, ironised, in a convent; the natural order, in the desert. What holds the axis here: labour is nearly absent, the immigrants are seen chiefly as those hidden and saved, the Adventurers are a type rather than a society, and consciousness stays mostly with Bob.

Score: 8.4 / 10