One Battle After Another Review

Anderson has never made anything this fast. The film runs close to three hours and moves like a thriller, and the late chase over rolling desert highway, shot so the cars vanish and reappear over successive crests, is a sequence people will be teaching for years. Leonardo DiCaprio plays incompetence with total conviction, a man whose politics have curdled into paranoia and whose one reliable instinct is love for his daughter, and the comedy comes from how badly he handles every single thing in front of him.

Sean Penn is the engine, playing a career officer whose rigidity is terrifying and ridiculous at the same time, risking absurdity on every line and never tipping over. Chase Infiniti has the hardest role and holds the moral weight of the picture. Jonny Greenwood's score presses forward without ever explaining what to feel. The film is unmistakably about the present, and the small number of dissenting reviews argue that its targets are too easy and the satire a little pleased with itself. That case is worth hearing. It barely dents the achievement.