Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” shows us the potential dangers of holding steadfast to an ideology. The protagonist Bob Ferguson — played by Leonardo DiCaprio — shows this as he emerges with his fellow revolutionaries, the French 75, a leftist militant group seeking to right American wrongs (think immigrant detention camps), with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government. The French 75 unknowingly battles against another group known as the Christmas Adventurers, a far-right group of the social elite with racist and reactionary aims. A clear parallel exists between the French 75 and the Adventurers, as both are consumed in their respective dogmas and tenets — secret knocks, code words, bases — with both groups holding fast to the principle that their ends always justify their means.
Time goes by, and Ferguson, even many years after his life with the French 75, holds on to his experiences with the group as he tries to raise his daughter, Willa — played by Chase Infiniti — in a somewhat normal and peaceful environment. Willa experiences a somewhat normal childhood until high school, when she begins to be hunted by Col. Steven Lockjaw, a crass and sociopathic military man played by Sean Penn, who stands out with a wonderfully abrasive performance. Col. Lockjaw devoted his life to the Adventurers, his very own political cause, which only stirs — more intensely — his right-wing actions and convictions. The Adventurers and the 75 clash; violence ensues, and there is a flash of muzzles and blood. Bob, caught in the center of it all, searches for his daughter, who is captured by Lockjaw’s men. Throughout the film, the audience is shown that not even relation by blood can be a means for reconciliation. Such intense stratification can delude anyone into the belief that their hill is worth dying on, no matter whose blood it is soiled with.
The character Sergio — played by Benicio del Toro, who turns in another great performance — exists in contrast to the beliefs of these organizations and thus most of the characters in the film as well. We never see Sergio spouting slogans that espouse the beliefs of some complex political cause or adhering completely to dogmatic principles. He occasionally works with and knows of the French 75, but only to help him do what he feels is right, which is, simply, giving shelter to displaced immigrants with nowhere to go. The only weapon Sergio owns is nearly incapable of doing any harm to anyone (as we see later in the film), and it is locked away with seemingly no use before Bob shows up and insists on having it on his journey to find his daughter. The plot with Sergio’s gun is where the film reveals the juxtaposition between Sergio and Bob; Sergio answers to no singular system of beliefs, save for his own sense of moral good, whilst Bob still clings to the paranoia and violence required of a member of a group such as the French 75.
By the end, Bob finds Willa at the other end of a gun she points at him, and she spouts the dogmatic revolutionary jargon that she has learned on her journey, a language Bob has now become alien to over the course of recent years. Willa threatens Bob several times, demanding he identify as a member of the French 75, but instead, he frames himself as acting solely out of care for her. For the first time in the film, there is a release of emotion and an embrace. In Bob’s semi-normal life with his daughter, he had forgotten the insistent rhetoric of the French 75 about following orders and channeling rage, and learned how to care and nourish instead. Drowning in their partisanship, many battle and suffer indefinitely for their love of something rather than someone, losing sight of the fact that movements were meant to serve people. This is the profound main message of “One Battle After Another,” as Paul Thomas Anderson cements himself, once again, as one of the best American filmmakers of the modern era.
