One Battle After Another: A Worthy Winner?

About a month ago, at the 98^th Academy Awards ceremony and after a very long and mostly dominant awards season, Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another took home six trophies capped by wins for Best Director and Best Picture. The film was hailed by critics since its September release, and its performance at “precursor”, local and national critics’ awards up through Oscar night is among the most dominant runs of all time. Sorry I've been away, life and a 14 month-old have a way of doing that.

In the past few years, my favorite films have regularly been nominated for Best Picture and rarely won; this year, one of my favorites of the decade so far won and won big. To unpack how great I think this film is, I’ll talk about the categories it took a trophy home in, and a few it didn’t. As always, it’s worth acknowledging that trophies don’t make a film great, and thinking of them piecemeal through that lens is reductive; please indulge me, I need structure.

The Losses.

• Best Supporting Actor (Benicio Del Toro). Yes, I’m aware Sean Penn won. Without stepping on a later category, he should have. But it’s still sad that Benicio Del Toro didn’t win big for his lovely performance as Sensei. He’s warm, confident, patriarchal, a key source of humor, but most importantly he gives the middle stretch of the film a beating heart. The ripped-from-the-headline topics that the film explores aren’t heady political issues, they’re people issues; showing the people who need help, and the helpers, is how to portray them.

• Best Score. I was ok with this loss; Greenwood’s best work on a PTA film was Phantom Thread, though this is a very good nomination.

• Best Cinematography. This film is gorgeous and filled up the big screen I first saw it on. Beyond just aesthetics, the camera is very dynamic in this film – you’ll see long takes, handheld photography, cameras affixed to car doors, all culminating in one of the most inventively-filmed car chases I’ve ever seen.

• Best Sound. Yeah, F1 won here for vroom vroom, but this film has plenty of vroom vroom in its climax! This film also knows that silence is just as powerful as booming sound; the quiet that precedes the military raids in this film ramps the tension as high as it goes.

• Best Production Design. I’m not surprised this film lost to Frankenstein in this category, since the Academy loves to reward lavish period pieces or noticeably elaborate sets, and this film takes place in locations that feel quite real. The opening sequence features an attack to liberate an immigration detention center located under a stretch of highway, images that feel pulled right out of a 60 Minutes report. Yet, this nomination speaks to the role of location scouting in production design. Someone had to find – or build – a shop and set of apartments for Sensei to run his “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” through, and a town to take the place of Baktan Cross that devolves into a riot after Lockjaw’s forces descend upon it. Someone had to find the magnificent “river of hills” to stage the climatic car chase through, and the sterile set of offices that Lockjaw ultimately meets his end in. That team knocked it out of the park.

• Best Actor. I’m not too upset that Leonardio DiCaprio lost here (though I would have preferred Timothee Chalamet as the winner), but I think we’re underrating DiCaprio both in this role and as an actor. Other performers have done this type of comedy, but to date Leo hasn’t; other actors have done this kind of action-oriented work, but Leo hasn’t for about 20 years; other actors can evoke the fear, frustration, and rays of happiness that Bob experiences over the course of the film, but few as well as Leo.

• Best Supporting Actress. This category turned into the most controversial, since the nominee was Teyana Taylor, whose character Perfidia Beverly Hills became something of a flashpoint as the race got a little too long and a little too testy. Perfidia is a Black revolutionary woman who lives for the thrill of the fight, expresses dominance through her body – including seducing the film’s antagonist, Sean Penn’s Lockjaw – and then betrays the cause and her fellow fighters after she’s captured and faces a murder charge. Much of the discourse around if a white man can/should write a character like this is a waste of time, and since she’s a fictional character I don’t have any problem with this portrayal at all. In her limited screen time, Perfidia’s given a lot of depth and complexity, which is challenging because little of it is noble despite such a charismatic and exciting performance. Another strain of criticism I encountered was that rewarding the performance is somehow celebrating a character who sells out or is charismatic yet possibly irredeemable despite not being an outright villain; not knowing how to feel about a compelling yet complex character is often a failure of the critic, and not the creator.

The Wins.

• Best Casting. Surprisingly, this film took home the Oscar’s newest award celebrating its casting despite Sinners tabbed as the favorite in this category, but on reflection I think this is a great choice. Look past the headliners of Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio Del Toro and Sean Penn – Chase Infiniti is an absolute revelation in her debut, but this film has an even more deeply rewarding cast. Think of the faces you see facing persecution at the hands of Lockjaw’s Border Control unit; think of his right-hand man lead interrogator, played by an actual former military interrogator; think of the members of the French 75 resistance group, led by Wood Harris; think of the mostly-white faces in the militarized police units; think of the nurses who coordinate Bob’s escape after he’s arrested, fighting a small act of rebellion that risks going unnoticed. It ALL works.

• Best Editing. I’m glad this award didn’t go to a film with the “most” editing, because here it’s seamless. The nearly three-hour film feels half its length due to its relentless pace, and yet nothing feels rushed. The action sequences flow as smoothly as the intimate conversations, and the “Battle of Baktan Cross” that cuts between Willa’s escape from the town, her friends facing interrogation, Bob’s fumbling attempts to find a phone and locate Willa, a riot brewing in the streets, and Sensei’s calmly rehearsed mass refugee exodus is an astounding sequence of protracted tension, humor, and power.

• Best Supporting Actor (Sean Penn). Penn has joined the rare three-time winner’s club, and it’s so, so deserved for his work here. Lockjaw is an act of totalizing creation, with everything from his facial ticks, posture, walking style, and vocal inflections all working seamlessly to conjure a character that isn’t quite human but is human enough to be believable. He’s menacing, occasionally the butt of the joke, and somehow both intellectually dim while being ruthlessly efficient as a commander. It’s been awhile since this award has gone to such a cinematic and instantly iconic villain, and Lockjaw belongs in that company.

• Best Adapted Screenplay. It’s probably been too long since I praised Paul Thomas Anderson here, who’s one of my favorite filmmakers; this category dictates focusing on his writing. Not only did he adapt a crazy novel long considered unadaptable, but his ability to update the text to meet the current moment is astounding. Despite its length, this film is compact in its dialogue and seemingly throwaway lines convey a whole host of ideas – I think often of Lockjaw’s order to “find me a reason to get into that town” and that reason being a massive raid to crack down on “narcoterrorism.” The film also depicts the somewhat-goofy and somewhat-terrifying secretive white supremacist society “The Christmas Adventurers” without tonally displacing the audience; in fact, the film strikes the most delicate balance between the light and the heavy in all aspects. Further, if you strip away the trappings of the revolutionaries and the militarized border control, the bones of this story are very simple: a father is desperately trying to reunite with his daughter, who in fact is the biological offspring of an evil man who is now trying to kill her. You can drop that frame into a Western genre, a medieval story, or even a space fantasy like Star Wars and it translates perfectly, and it’s to the film’s credit that it transfers here. Building the story out of this narrative makes it timeless despite the relevance of the film’s material.

• Best Director. As ever, Anderson almost makes directing look easy. His shot composition is always natural yet with purpose, and everything I said about the variety of filmmaking styles in the cinematography section is true here; he orchestrates long takes beautifully that have become less showy than in his earlier work, and here they leave the viewers breathlessly caught up in the action. His sense of tension has refined from the edgy fun he had in Boogie Nights, but he still can get an audience to hold their breath. Despite all the narrative turns this film makes, what impresses me most about his filmmaking is his restraint and distance; he leaves just enough room for the audience to question if all the French 75’s methods are worth cheering for, if Bob Ferguson really is so noble, and allows the audience to live in some ambiguity. Mature filmmaking from one of our great talents indeed.

• Best Picture. Yes, I really think it is.