On today’s episode, I’m going to cover my thoughts on last year’s biggest movie, One Battle After Another. Stayed tuned until the end of the episode to hear an important announcement. Spoilers ahead for OBAA.
Adaptations are tricky things. If you go too far one way, you end up with something that is slavish to the original work, which can turn off many fans. You go the other way and you run the risk of losing what made the original work interesting in the first place. This is probably a good place to start when looking at One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic that won six Oscars at the last academy awards ceremony, including for best picture and director. Paul Thomas Anderson has adapted Thomas Pynchon in the past – he did so with Inherent Vice, starring Joaquin Phoenix, in 2014. Unlike that adaptation, which, as far as Pynchon adaptations go, was as probably as faithful as it could have been: One Battle After Another takes very loose inspiration from its source material – the love triangle between the faded revolutionary, his paramour in hiding, and the evil governmental baddie set on ruining their lives are taken from Vineland but little else is. 
Thomas Pynchon is notoriously difficult to adapt to film or television. His wide-range of esoteric digressions, not to mention characters breaking into song, along with his willful breaking of societal taboos, makes his novels, which are an acquired taste, certainly, a tonal mess on-screen. PTA smartly took the easiest piece of Inherent Vice, the Neo-Noir main plot of a stoner former cop trying to track down his estranged former girlfriend, and discarded everything that would have injected humor or zaniness into the proceedings. This works in Inherent Vice because that movie feels very close to our own understanding of what the late 1960s was like, at least from those who know it mostly from pop-culture. 
One of the main problems I had with this movie – and I will put my cards on the table here: I think it’s a mess and not worthy of best picture – is that, unlike Inherent Vice, I need to know the socio-political climate of the broader world of the movie to understand the actions of the characters. I saw some videos online where people compared this movie to Star Wars – with the characters in OBAA having analogs in Star Wars – but Star Wars had an opening crawl, so you’d better understand the rough outline of the universe. Another example of a movie that did a good job of setting your expectations of what was to come was the opening credits of Watchmen. There’s no scene like that in One Battle so I’m constantly asking questions like, “what year is this movie set in? Is this set in our world or like an alternate timeline?” 
These things took me out of the movie and seemed to be a fixable problem that PTA simply wasn’t bothered by. As much as I didn’t like it, Argo at least had an opening that gave you some context for what you were about to watch. Here – I had to ask if revolutionary politics were much more common because of the level of tyranny that the government was engaged in. Again, if we learned more about the wider world, I would not have had these issues.
Bob Ferguson was in love with Perfidia Beverly Hills and her refusal to settle down after the birth of their child effectively ends that relationship, along with her “one last job” where she shoots and kills a security guard in a failed bank heist. The deal she makes with Sean Penn’s character makes sense, from a self-preservation standpoint. I didn’t have a problem there. Except for – I’m not sure if it’s because PTA saw that Sean Baker’s Anora won best picture the year before and said, “hold my beer” but I felt the hotel scene with the two characters was really unnecessary and gratuitous. You’ve already shown that Sean Penn’s character is a pervert when he was masturbating in his truck while watching Perfidida. This felt like overkill. If you had a scene with Perfidia’s reaction to the hotel scene, then maybe it’s a way to define her character but that really doesn’t happen. I’ll touch on the letter later. 
Due to the scenes before the time jump, the movie received some light criticisms that it was racist against black women. It felt, when I watched the movie, that every other line seemed to contain at least one “m*ther*ucker” when it came out of the mouths of black female characters, with the possible exception of Regina Hall’s Deandra, who barely says anything. Also – if you were trying to rob a bank, would you stand on the teller desks (good on PTA shooting in the last bank of the world that had Heat-style teller’s desks) and give a forty-five second monologue about power? Wouldn’t an actual revolutionary group just send like whatever demands they had to the media? What are the demands of the French 75? Just like vaguely left wing or do they have concrete demands? Okay – I’ve beaten the dead horse. 
Before we time jump, let’s hear a word from our sponsor. 
We’ve jumped. It’s now 16 years later in our story and we hear, via VO, that very little has changed.
Except Bob. Bob’s revolutionary fervor has cooled – he now seems to spend most of his days smoking pot or drinking. We learn early on that he still has connections to a band he used to play in – this is almost certainly a carry-over from Vineland – and little else. Willa is now 16 and we learn that….she takes karate lessons? That’s about all we learn from her until she is picked up by Deandra during a high-school dance. We also see here the one time in the movie that I laughed – the scene where Bob is talking to Willa’s high school teacher and talks about the truth and Benjamin Franklin owning slaves. 
We don’t see much of Lockjaw in the intervening years. We see, pre-jump, that Perfidia has left him and we assume that he is now a sad and broken man. In current day, after being promoted, he wants to join a secret society, The Christmas Adventurers. Why? We don’t know much about the Christmas Adventurers other than what they tell us – they are a racist and powerful secret society that wants to keep America primarily white. So…why does Sean Penn’s character want to join them? It’s not clear. We see later in the movie that Sean Penn has the power to order hundreds of US Troops into an American city on the flimsiest of pretenses, then invades a nunnery. That seems pretty powerful to me. Does he want to join for the network? Does he have political aspirations? We don’t know because we are not told. We learn here that he cannot join if he has sex with a non-white woman. He lies here and this sets the plot in motion for him to find out if Willa is his child and, if she is, to kill her. 
We then see that one of the old French 75ers has been bagged and the word has gone out that Willa and Bob are in danger. Most of the second act of the movie is Bob trying to track down Willa. He visits Sensei, Benicio Del Toro’s character – why? Wouldn’t he turn to his bandmates first, as we know that they are his friends? It’s never really explained. If there’s one part of the movie that I had the hardest time with its probably this and the Christmas Adventurers plotline. Why would Bob go to Sensei first instead of literally anyone else? What is the connection between these two characters that takes place before the movie starts? Your daughter’s karate teacher? Again, had there been a setup or a montage or something to establish the relationship between these characters it would not have bothered me as much but it’s clear from the dialogue that Sensei did not know (or really care) that Bob was in the French 75. So…Bob just lucks into finding the one person in town who has similar revolutionary politics as him? That seems awfully convenient for the plot to function – too convenient for me. Also – I accept that the Sensei character is tied to a very specific form of harboring immigrants who are in the process of being deported. Given that every character he interacts with seems to be members of the Hispanic or Native community, I bought this more easily than the multi-racial, multi-gendered vaguely left-wing French 75.
The other issue is really pacing. I think PTA could have cut the scene with Leo falling out of the tree and going to the hospitable because it doesn’t really add anything to his character or the plot but does add on ten minutes to the runtime of this already too long movie. 
From what I’ve read, there was a scene written between Deandra and Perfidia that was either filmed but cut or never filmed that fleshed out their relationship. As it is in the movie, it’s not clear why Deandra would stick her neck out for Willa to the degree that she does. I read that the cut scene would have shown the two of them to be best friends. I imagine this scene was cut for time but would have really helped explain the dynamic between these three characters.
We get to the nunnery. Willa and Deandra are laying low after the nuns grant them sanctuary. By laying low, I mean firing high powered machine guns that would have been heard from miles away. How long are they here until Sean Penn shows up? It’s not clear. The nuns offer no defense against Sean Penn or the military making me question what the point of going there in the first place was. Sean Penn performs the DNA test – Willa is his daughter. Here, if you’re wondering if Willa’s karate skills come to good use the answer is…not really. She runs around in a circle before he wrestles to the ground and drags her out. He drives some distance only to hand her over to his hitman, Avanti, who is to drive her to another location where she is to be handled – it’s unclear if the intention here was for Sean Penn to return later to this location and kill her or if the other dudes who are hanging around with nothing to do are the ones to kill her but not Avanti.
Luckily for the plot, this leaves Sean Penn alive long enough for a Christmas Adventurer who has been tasked with “cleaning up the mess” to come and shoot Sean Penn for – I guess? – lying to the Christmas Adventurers on his application. Also, conveniently, Avanti snaps at the right moment for Willa, responding to a racial slur with extreme violence, though he dies in the chaos. This leaves Willa able to escape in Avanti’s ride which leads us to the car chase, with Bob behind Tim and Tim trailing Willa.
The way the chase scene in the third act was hyped up, I was expecting something on par with Duel or the bridge scene from Sorcerer or Dual of the Fates from Star Wars the Phantom Menace. What I got was a five-minute scene that was…decent. If it had been done in a Fast & Furious or Expendables movie, no one would have called it one of the best scenes of the year. The music, which consists of discordant piano, adds a sense of panic and dread to the scene but that music has been used intermittently over the last forty minutes of the movie so the effect is minimized because we’ve heard it so much before this scene.
The way this scene ended was, I thought, clever. Not sure why Tim, who was able to shoot through one moving car into another, gets out of the car unarmed unless… plot. Also – not sure why, after you believe you have shot and killed Sean Penn, that Willa needs to be killed. Is it a fear that Penn told Willa about the Christmas Adventurers, so now must die? Seems extreme.
Reunited and it feels so good. Except there is one dangling thread – Sean Penn. We see him get gassed by the Christmas Adventurers in a special gas chamber office that they must have spent millions of dollars to retrofit in order to ensure that it didn’t leak to any other part of the office. Sounds risky. Also – if they could have just told him to come to the office, why didn’t they do this instead of sending Tim? It didn’t seem like there was any kind of ramifications for Tim not actually killing Sean Penn’s character.
Finally, Bob gives Willa a letter from Perfidia. This ending sucked for a couple of reasons – 1). I didn’t believe that the character we see earlier in the movie would send this letter. Because she’s not on screen for the past 16 years and because no one else has seen her, we don’t see if her character has actually changed. This letter and the sentiments therein come completely from left field. 2). I don’t know why the letter would spur on Willa to become a revolutionary. Wouldn’t it have made more sense for her grandmother to send the letter to tell her that she had the spirit of a revolutionary within her? That way, at least, there would have been a historical reason for her to continue in these footsteps. Because there’s no starting point to this arc, Willa is just a normal kid whose politics are unknown to us at the beginning of the movie, her change to a revolutionary at the end  of the movie is then meaningless. Bob has no real arc. He is on the same couch, both at the end and beginning of the movie. 
Why did this movie win best picture? There are a few possible answers to this. I think there was a large contingency of people who genuinely believed it was in fact the best picture of the year. 
While I find that hard to believe, PTA has a large number of fans (every single one of whom apparently made YouTube videos about how great the movie was) and his films generally strike a nerve with people in the academy. He’s been nominated multiple times in the past. He’s worked with top talent both in front of and behind the scenes. In a year that many people saw as weak, he was always going to have a chance. When the NYT did their top 100 movies of the past 25 years he was only behind Christopher Nolan in terms of number of movies on the list. It’s really difficult to overestimate how popular he is with film critics and the business as a whole. 
People also really like Leo - like really really like him. Like Ryan Gosling doing comedy, the academy seems to love when an actor plays against type. The combination of the two of them was probably too much for some academy members to ignore. I call this the “La La Land” effect – Gosling and Emma Stone’s chemistry carried that movie and, if you were charmed by the two of them, you overlooked what was a mediocre musical and thought more highly of it than was due. I think a similar thing is happening here with Leo and PTA.
The way the race was described this year was that it was down to OBAA and Sinners. Sinners was a surprise hit and made about 4X its budget. Ryan Coogler has made several movies that have made the business a lot of money but is still relatively young. The fact that Sinners was nominated for 16 Oscars - the most in Oscars history - but lost both best picture and director means that it’s likely that Coogler will, someday, be seen as needing a “makeup Oscar”. 
This is why I think PTA won - it was his time. In all organizations, there are unwritten rules of how things should be done and, almost always, the organization rewards people who play by the rules. PTA has been beloved by film critics for a very long time; in every interview he’s in, he seems to know exactly what film to reference to impress even the most jaded film critics and film snobs.
He’s made movies that are character pieces but are respectable enough and have big enough budgets that critics (and sometimes audiences) adore him. He’s also worked with nearly every serious male actor of the last 30 years - with Leo now joining the ranks of Tom Cruise, Joaquin Phoenix, Daniel Day Lewis, Adam Sandler, and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. 
They see him as one of the best filmmakers working today and, because there is a long history of revolutionary filmmakers not receiving their due, they wanted to reward him in a year where there was nothing that was going to be talked about in ten, twenty, or thirty years. 

They overlooked that the film lost a decent chunk of change, in part, because critics heaped so much praise on it. It was seen as a collective effort to get PTA his Oscar. I guess so we can all sleep easy now?
The only other movie I have seen that was nominated for best picture was Train Dreams, which I thought was almost half as long and at least twice as good. I think there is still the Netflix stigma and I’m sure that hurt the film’s chances but a quiet movie about a small man’s life logging at the beginning of the last century was not going to beat out movies with LOUD MESSAGES ABOUT POLITICS AND STUFF!
To be fair to PTA, I do think he’s a skilled director and writer - Boogie Nights is great and while I think it should have rightfully lost best picture to No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood is a technically brilliant movie - even if I found the movie’s message to be a bit muddled and the film’s enduring popularity baffling. 
Both of those movies, though, are why OBAA was so disappointing to me. It did make me appreciate what he did with Inherent Vice more, so there is that. I guess I just don’t understand why people seem to want to watch this movie multiple times. We talked mostly about the plot and I’ve seen people defend this movie as PTA trying to do a Tarantino movie but Tarantino would have had a sharper script, with better dialogue. He also would have used better, smarter needle drops and / or score. His camera shots would have been more inspiring – there are no interesting shots in this movie. Compare this to something like Kill Bill, which, adjusted for inflation, cost like half as much, yet was much more visually interesting. 
That may sound harsh but when you’ve won best picture and best director, then we should compare your movies to others that have been deemed great. I only saw the movie once on my 24” laptop monitor – I’m sure if I saw it with a crowd of people some of the criticisms would have been muted but, watching it alone, I found it to be a deeply flawed film undeserving of its Oscar wins.
On to good news: I’m finishing up writing an ebook! And it will be available! For purchase! I’ll announce more details next episode but the book will be a longform argument about mandatory national service that was inspired by episode 2 of this podcast – Will Mandatory National Service Heal the Nation?
Thank you for listening to this episode of Elegant Ramblings. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, please consider liking and subscribing to the channel on iTunes or YouTube. You’ll be able to find show notes there. Hope you enjoyed. Bye for now.