We’re joined by our resident Paul Thomas Anderson expert (and Mike’s brother), Stephen Glass, to whom we’ve previously spoken about Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza, for another discussion of One Battle After Another. Stephen’s seen it in both VistaVision and IMAX 70mm, and can offer a sense of the experience Mike and José missed seeing it in IMAX Digital, and so begins a wide-ranging conversation about the film’s aesthetics, tone, politics, influences and more.
By far Paul Thomas Anderson’s most expensive film, with a budget some four or five times what he’s used to, and probably his most accessible, One Battle After Another entertains us enormously and effortlessly without sacrificing the complexity and nuance for which his work is known. Set in an alternate America oppressed by Christofascism, the alternate part is that there’s a very active militant revolutionary group, the French 75, setting bombs off and freeing detained minorities. Leonardo DiCaprio is part of it, and sixteen years after the conclusion of his group’s activities, their work has entered countercultural legend, but he’s become a drug-addicted, paranoid burnout, trying to raise a teenage daughter. When the powers that be come looking for them, they’re separated, all hell breaks loose, and he has to step up.
José finds One Battle After Another to be the film of the moment, the state of the nation film that Eddington could only dream of being, a powerful, invigorating expression of what ails America and what it means to resist. Mike is more cynical, seeing an element of mockery in the revolution that has no apparent intention to end and is carried out over generations. We love the easygoing style of filmmaking that Anderson seems to have grown into, comparing it to the rigid formality of his early work, and finding that he has a talent for action cinema that’s never quite come out before. We also discuss the film’s themes of youth and ageing, parenting, the Christian right and more.
One Battle After Another is an unmissable film, the kind that fifty years ago would have defined America’s national conversation. Cinema no longer holds that level of cultural cachet, sadly, but One Battle After Another is a powerful, energetic, and very funny reminder of what film can do at its best.
This is a trial episode of a possible podcast that Michael Glass of ‘Writing About Film’ and I are posting primarily to get feedback. It’s done as an mp4 so you can play it on your computer’s usual player, like a video. I have this romantic idea of the movies as a conjunction of place, people and experiences, all different for each of us, a context in which individual and separate beings try to commune, where the individual experience overlaps with the communal and where that overlapping is demarcated by how we measure the differing responses between ourselves and the rest of the audience: do they laugh when we don’t (and what does that mean?); are they moved when we feel like laughing (and what does that say about me or the others) etc. The idea behind this podcast is to satiate the urge I sometimes have when I see a movie alone – but that I also hope is shared by at least some of you — to eavesdrop on what others say. What do they think? How does their experience compare to mine? Snippets are overhead as one leaves the cinema and are often food for thought. A longer snippet of such an experience is what this podcast hopes to provide: it’s two friends chatting immediately after a movie. It’s unrehearsed, meandering, slightly convoluted, certainly enthusiastic, and well informed, if not necessarily on all aspects a particular work gives rise to, certainly in terms of knowledge of cinema in general and considerable experience of watching different types of movies and watching movies in different types of ways. It’s not a review. It’s a conversation. One roughly transmuted into another format so that you may overhear. We know the design of the image is lousy; and that the transitions between snippets are roughly cut. But what do you think of the idea, the title, the format? Feedback and suggestions most gratefully received.
Episode 1 (Girls Trip, Malcolm D. Lee, USA, 2017)