Parenting And Resistance Are Just One Battle After Another (And Another And Another)

Earlier this month, ICE agents descended upon a man driving with his daughter; he fled, as one does from unskilled and thuggish stormtroopers operating against constitutional provisions, and immediately on arriving at his home, dashed inside, leaving his child in the car and the ICE agents at his doorstep. Fascists do as fascists will, of course, so what else could they do but use her as bait in a grotesque attempt to lure her parents outside for summary brutalization, arrest, and violation of their rights as members of American society?

The happy part to this story’s ending is that the girl is fine, and so’s her mother; the sad and completely unsurprising part is that ICE came back to nick her father two days later. Listen closely and you’ll catch echoes of the family’s ordeal in One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2025 adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. If there are reasonable odds that Anderson keeps up with current events, the chances that he pays attention to regional news, as in the Leominster case, are lower; even lower than that are the chances he has access to a crystal ball and foresaw both the broader national crisis we’re facing and this particular instance of one arm of American law enforcement indulging the unchecked power to break the same mores the Republican administration likes to crow about embracing.

Like the film’s title says: one battle after another. That’s the way of things right now. It’ll probably stay that way until 2028 (though however that year concludes, it’s guaranteed that the fighting will continue beyond). In the movie at least, the battles eventually draw to an end, with the foreboding promise of others being fought by other people occupying their own narratives. What we’re seeing in One Battle After Another is a snapshot of a decade and a half and change, focused on a fixed set of characters fighting against fascist power’s superstructures with all they’ve got: Pat Calhoun, alias Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio); his daughter Charlene, alias Willa (Chase Infiniti); Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), her sensei; DeAndre (Regina Hall), Bob’s erstwhile comrade-at-arms from the French 75, a leftist revolutionary group dedicated to overthrowing said superstructures.

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Willa’s mother Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) earns an honorary mention in that number, though she takes a powder early in the film when Willa’s just a baby, unable to shut out the beat of her revolutionary’s heart. One Battle After Another is a movie about resistance, its demands, and its costs, and drills into the last of these to focus on Bob not as a freedom fighter but as a dad; parenthood causes even the normies among us to burn out, but Bob actively chooses to become a burnout even as he gladly accepts the mantle of “father.” Perfidia abandons them, though the film spares her any judgment. Anderson is more interested in humanizing that one abrupt choice than litigating it, a task that he performs with graceful economy of character. Bob’s paternal responsibility to Willa is a check in the “good dad” column; his drug habits are several checks in the “needs work” column.

It speaks to Anderson’s skill as an architect of distended narratives that One Battle After Another’s parenting motif functions as a concrete pylon for action and political intrigue and rank human cruelty; it’s the beacon the film comes back to time and again as Willa is targeted by Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), a figure seemingly engineered in a lab from a combination of Wile E. Coyote and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s DNA, infatuated with Perfidia from their encounters during her days with the French 75. Lockjaw has paternal responsibility, too, or the possibility of it: he may or may not be Willa’s biological father. What he is without question is a racist pursuing membership with a white supremacist cabal, led by Tony Goldwyn and typically assembled in gold-dappled spaces that reflect a certain president’s favorite alloy, so whatever genetic relationship he shares with Willa, he isn’t father material.

Rather, Lockjaw is a caricature representative of the human rights abuses Americans are suffering right now and have suffered since, oh, around 2016 (and frankly since before that and beyond). Embodied by Penn, he’s nearly laughable save for the knowledge that he has sway to ruin one’s life. Bob is the opposite side of that coin, a regular man with no sway to speak of, though that’s partly his fault for marinating his brain in narcotics. But Anderson again withholds judgment, more or less; treating Bob as a human punchline is a gentler form of judgment, and supplies One Battle After Another little pockets of air to breathe in between sustained moments of dreadful tension, as Bob, Willa, DeAndre, and Sergio each try to outmaneuver the overarmed military predators hunting them. If the emergence of authoritarian rule is eruptive, at least Anderson leaves his audience occasional beats for laughter.

That’s intrinsic to his filmmaking. Even Phantom Thread, the best low-key BDSM movie from the 2010s, has a sense of humor. But like all of Anderson’s work, Phantom Thread has a sense of invention, too, and so does One Battle After Another, notably a car chase over rolling California highway, where viewers experience the movement of each vehicle involved head-on: cinematographer Michael Bauman’s camera is seemingly glued to the hoods, the curvilinear motion imparting bracing sensation to unbearably thrilling effect. Anderson’s virtuosity is one of his greatest gifts. But his steadfast devotion to his human concerns remains the key to his work, even in One Battle After Another, a movie for our time that could just as well have been made in bygone ones.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Paul Thomas Anderson
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Chase Infiniti, Sean Penn, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, Teyana Taylor, Tony Goldwyn, Paul Grimstad, Wood Harris, Dijon Duenas
Release Date: September 26, 2025

Bostonian culture journalist Andy Crump covers the movies, beer, music, and being a dad for way too many outlets, perhaps even yours. He has contributed to Paste since 2013. You can find his collected work at “his personal blog”:https://agcrump.wordpress.com. He’s composed of roughly 65% craft beer.