The Real Battle of "One Battle After Another"

"The movie, which runs two hours and forty-one minutes, is stuffed with fast-moving, complicated action and intricate dialogue, and the editing intercuts quickly among its teeming array of places, events, and characters. The first time I saw it, I found myself struggling to keep up with what was going on-but that feeling of being behind was intensified by a lack of psychological grasp,"

"Anderson, who both wrote and directed the film, suppresses psychological complexity, creating characters who are little more than abstractions. The result is a film that, despite all its intensely realistic and viscerally physical action, is a work of grand symbolic design. The movie is strangely, unusually dialectical within itself-composed of many layers that don't coalesce or connect but reflect off one another and generate tension. Through all these inconsistencies, absences, dissonances, and contradictions, an overarching coherence emerges."

Paul Thomas Anderson's film is a spectacular, exquisitely detailed fantasy of revolution and resistance starring Leonardo DiCaprio that looks to history for visions of hope. The film runs two hours and forty-one minutes and features fast-moving, complicated action, intricate dialogue, and quick intercutting among many locations, events, and characters. Initial viewing can feel disorienting due to suppressed psychological complexity and characters that function as abstractions, but repeat viewings reward attention to detail. The film favors grand symbolic design and dialectical layering over internal character logic, generating tension through inconsistencies while achieving an overarching coherence and presenting high political stakes in an alternate United States.

Read at The New Yorker