One Battle After Another After Another

I’m embarrassed to say I’ve not read an entire Thomas Pynchon book. Friends tell me he’s right up my alley: goofy, para-political, stylistically zany. All I’ve got for now are the film adaptations. Paul Thomas Anderson, thank God, seems to enjoy turning Pynchon’s arcane tomes into artifacts for the silver screen. We had Inherent Vice (2014), and now we have One Battle After Another (2025), based on Pynchon’s Vineland (1990).

Let’s get it out of the way: PTA has never made a bad movie, and this is no exception. Leonardo DiCaprio marries comedy, fatherly love, and terror in ways few other living actors could. Newcomer Chase Infiniti ain’t half bad either as his daughter, Charlene/Willa. Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn somehow match their costars’ frantic style. I’ve got nothing to complain about, not after about the first 20 minutes anyway.

But, as a paying ticketholder, and I’m entitled to my opinion: I spent the movie’s first section perplexed. I suspect this was to do with Anderson’s translating Pynchon-ian material, or that’s my hunch, based on friends who know Pynchon better.

PTA opens the film in a moment of revolution. The main cast of characters form French 75, an cringe-inducing but well-meaning band of hippy revolutionaries fighting for Black Power, immigrants’, and women’s rights. They scream things like “this is what power looks like” while pointing a gun at a wounded security guard; they bomb ICE detention facilities and rob banks. It is, however, in this imagining not the 60s. The revolution, not televised, seems wholly out of time. All history, all revolutionary history anyway, becomes one.

Anderson presents this section, with its character introductions and stakes building, as one long montage (thanks again Scorsese). Tonal whiplash doesn’t even begin to describe it. One moment the rebellion seems genuinely admirable; we trace camps full of undocumented migrants, switch to a tender love story, and celebrate with the guerillas. The next, a border patrol officer is asking Black revolutionary Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) to dominate him in the bedroom. I think the shots of him pitching a tent are supposed to be funny?

My understanding is that Pynchon only suggests backgrounds for the characters, explains them without exactly showing them. I can’t help but wonder if such an approach might have been better here too. PTA spends what felt like an eternity with the faux-60s, so long that I found myself befuddled: am I supposed to be laughing? Cringing? Jeering? All? Leo’s performance, once we get to him in detail, brought me back to tonal balance—I felt I could laugh and feel myself thrilled. But for a while there, I was lost. I’m not sure any other actor could have brought me back.

What am I to do with this? I don’t know. All the reviews seem to be positive, so, let me nitpick. Another day, another battle.