Paul Thomas Anderson is a director that loves collision. He’s never been one to do “weird for no reason in his films,” Anderson centers his stories around conflict. Magnolia circled fractured families, while Phantom Thread leans on relationship power dynamics. There’s not a single scene that gives the audience any catharsis of reprieve.
The title is blunt and violently accurate. Anderson bombards us with chaos between lovers, enemies, generations, and ideologies. There’s no traditional ease into the story. The entire story is wearing because one of biggest consistencies is losing.
In his eighth and praised film Phantom Thread, the battles are only shown quietly under the sound of breakfast table-talk power struggles. However, his newest work strips away table-talk, and only shows bare-knuckled tensions with no reprieve.
People have always referred to Anderson’s career as swaying between maximalist and restrained. Earlier features like Boogie Nights and Magnolia were polychromatic and practically shook with excess. The all appraised Punch-Drunk Love tucked its intensity away into claustrophobic spaces. This new film is like synthesis. The camera work remains lean much like his other works while the score seems to hold back. Critics reported that One Battle After Another was a thrilling and funny epic of American social commentary that unfolds too messy (view at your own risk.)
For longtime fans of Anderson, One Battle After Another will show more than ever the directors obsession with the catastrophic persistence of human need. His 2007 war operatic tragedy, There Will Be Blood, leaned heavily on allegory. This time it’s all anatomy, the conflict never stops.
Some have commented that this new release is Anderson in his most unforgiving form, never giving the audience the catharsis of reprieve. Others saw it as a risky experiment. A complete unmerciful examination of how struggle defines us as people and a country. However you choose to look at it though, it’s unmistakably Anderson. A storyteller that refuses to make anything less than confrontational, soul searching, and director incapable of making anything less than confrontational, searching, and hopelessly human art.
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