After three viewings of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, I’m still not sure why Leonardo Dicaprio uttering the words ‘from here on out it’s one battle after another’ evokes such a whirlwind of emotions within me. Granted, it contains the title of the movie and every music fan knows the power that just saying the name of the thing possesses, whether it be the title of the song, album or even band, it provokes the need to just scream those words a little bit louder. It’s a firebrand, a slogan, a motto, maybe even a call to arms and that’s certainly how it felt in the movie theatre even if all I was being called to do was sit there and take in the remaining two plus hours of the film. Throughout those two hours I find myself winding and weaving through an emotional journey that isn’t really my own, yet I find myself moved with every beat. I can’t decide if it’s an overly sentimental film or if I’m just an overly sentimental person but I find myself living and dying from scene to scene and in an article messier than Leo’s man bun, let’s see if I can figure out why.


Over the course of this year I have found myself often thinking back to old cinema trips. Well, in fact I’ve become a firm practitioner in the art of regression and have found myself looking back to those childhood memories that seem just out of reach and one that arrives more often than not is a late night calm as I sit in the back of my dad’s car as it rolls out of Aberdeen. We’re heading home from the very cinema that I still go to, the radio playing The Corrs ‘Unplugged’ album or a Shania Twain record that I find myself these days tracking down to listen to to see if they can help me recapture this feeling, to interrogate it a little further. There’s a darkness that surrounds the car, that feeling you could get as a kid that you’re out in the world at a time that wasn’t made for you and there’s something slightly alien about the emptiness of the dark roads and the dancing taillights around the car. But what I remember most is a sleepy stillness, a contentment likely brought on by what I had just watched, a film I’d consider to be the best I’d ever seen for twenty four to seventy two hours before inevitably forgetting it. I was a fraught and frightened boy a lot of the time, already anxious and ready to put myself at the centre of all the worlds problems but these times seem totally free from that. Maybe I was just overtired or on a post Pepsi-Max caffeine crash (there’s something scary about how long I’ve been ingesting this mysterious black liquid) but something inside me is still trying to recapture that feeling and is still wandering into cinema screens on a Saturday night hoping that something similar lies on the other side. One Battle After Another doesn’t have me leave the cinema feeling a satisfied stillness inside of me, it stirs and shakes everything up. 


The opening portion of the film, the fast moving prologue to set us up mostly provides a visceral thrill, an envious rush as we see Leo and Teyana Taylor along with their cohorts establish themselves as a revolutionary group. As a fairly liberal and left wing person, I find myself in a perpetual state of hard relate throughout this part of the film, at times wanting to stand up and pump my fist in the cinema screen screaming ‘VIVA LA REVOLUCION…VIVA’. That is before PTA (or possibly its Colonel Steven J Lockjaw) pulls the idealistic rug from under us. It comes crashing down, characters make decisions with horrendous consequences and before we know it we are into the crux of the movie.
I could probably go through the middle portion of the film frame by frame and tell you how it hurt me. I can’t explain why Chase Infiniti doing karate to ‘Dirty Work’ by Steely Dan made me feel the way it did, maybe it’s something to do with the weight of time passing summed up by the ‘sixteen years later, the world has changed very little’ narration, maybe it’s just the striking visuals but by the time we hear Benito Del Toro say ‘you’re not breathing’ he might as well have been speaking to me. It’s then that we meet Bob Ferguson, the identity assumed by Leo’s character since he’s been in hiding. He appears to us washed up, hungover, stoned and in full cringy dad mode having settled into his new life as a runaway ex-revolutionary living in a perpetual state of both paranoia and inexpectancy that trouble may yet find him again. Bob for me is a visceral force that drives us through the film. We watch in real time as he is summoned from his stoner slumber and is forced back into a revolutionary reality, fumbling his way through events as they unfold in front of him. He leaves his home and is thrust into a combative reality that he’s left behind and when he teams up with Del Toro’s Sensei St. Carlos the films enters a heart-pounding buddy caper phase, it’s endlessly quotable and irresistibly joyous to watch unfold. We watch a mini mid-life crisis go hand in hand with the action as Bob fails to remember the passwords to gain contact with his old comrades and discover where his daughter is being taken, struggles with the physical demands of being a man on the run (literally) but somehow makes it through with a little help from his friend, or Sensei, who hands him a beer, a rifle and tries to offer him spiritual guidance – ‘Courage Bob. Courage’.
Meanwhile we see Willa, Bob’s teenage daughter, face the reality that her father isn’t completely paranoid and may have, in some respects, been right all along as her world comes crashing down in the blink of an eye as she too is thrust into a world that Bob had tried to protect her against. If Bob is the relatable centre of the film, a proxy for my own millennial malaise then it is Willa who provides the real emotional heart of the film. Much like how we see Bob confront his middle-aged shortcomings, we now watch Willa’s coming of age as she goes from a teenage girl frustrated from the tedium of semi-parenting her own dad to a rabbit in the headlights as she discovers she’s in a danger before transforming again into a fiery action hero as she battles with Sean Penn’s Lockjaw. Watching Willa move through the film weighs heavily, after all most of the narrative arc is a consequence of Willa; Bob you feel is fighting more for Willa than he is himself, Lockjaw’s motivations are all driven by Willa’s inconvenient existence in his world and it could be argued that it’s the emotional struggles of bringing Willa into the world that set Teyana Taylor’s Pefidia Beverley Hills on the path to recklessness that brings down the French 75. The whole film rests on Willa’s shoulders and as an audience we feel it every second she’s on the screen from those opening martial arts manoeuvres to seeing her step out from her father’s protective shadow and into her mother’s footsteps. A special mention has to go to the beautiful scene at the back end of the film when through trust devices and a dreamy melody, Bob and Willa are reunited. Willa screams out into the open air ‘who are you?’ as Bob approaches but given the weight of what she’s discovered about her own way into the world throughout the film we feel she may just as much be speaking to herself. Bob this time provides the password before bringing Willa back with the reassurance that despite everything she’s learned about herself and the chaos and confusion it’s caused that one thing remains true – ‘I’m your dad.’
If the last thousand words or so hadn’t made it clear, I love this film and whilst the plot, acting, cinematography etc. are all spectacular in their own right, I knew there was something deeper driving my affection, I just didn’t know what. In fact, I didn’t even really know when I began this article however whilst writing I’ve interrogated myself, racked my brains, knowing that the passwords must be in there somewhere. I might not be as old or as world weary as Bob but I feel his fatigue and in my mid 30’s, it’s painful to admit that I recognise his sense that the world is starting to leave him behind slightly and his exasperation at what it’s becoming. I too have struggled through a day that felt all too much with a fuzzy head from a few small beers the previous night and found myself proclaiming ‘life man, life!’ (maybe not the direct quote) as a friend hands me another beer. But beyond this I feel like I’ve also been on a microcosm of Willa’s journey, I’ve found myself, head spinning, trying to make sense of the circumstances surrounding me. For reasons we won’t get into here, that struggle for identity, that confusion around your own origin, rings a little too truly with me and I really feel the weight of looking outwards for answers about yourself. Of course Willa looks past Lockjaw, eyes set on the mother she believed to be dead and ponders what the consequences of her still being alive mean for her.
I might sit here feeling like my own jaded version of Bob Ferguson, albeit more haunted than hunted but when I think back to my younger self, the one in the back seat rounding the corner away from the cinema, he has Willa energy – he likes to think of himself as fearless but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know or how that will come to shape him. As I previously said this film shook me up and by the end it reads to me as a sort of affirmation that it might not be time to give up just yet, that not everything has gone to complete shit. By the time ‘American Girl’ kicks in and we’re out the door with Willa, whilst Bob lies on the sofa struggling through a selfie, I was ready to woop at the cinema screen. Through the two plus hours I’d felt everything the film had thrown at me and seen plenty of myself on the screen, had my wokeness affirmed, seen semi-drunken adventures glorified, been told it’s ok to spend all day in a dressing gown and had every drop of sentiment squeezed out of me. And along the way? Just a few small tears.
Nathan Brown (Instagram – moodswingsabz) is a freelance writer from Aberdeen, Scotland. Having previously hosted the mental health focused podcast ‘Mood Swings’, his writing now covers topics such as film, football culture, travel and still, occasionally, mental health.
