One Battle After Another

I tend to not like movies that put their ideas before their characters, so it was hard to love this. But so this movie is definitely more complex and satirical in its ideas than conservatives or liberals give it credit for (I mean, between Ben Shapiro’s review and the Hollywood Reporter’s review and one of the top reviews on this site explicitly calling out Trump, a lot of people took this thing to be a drama when it’s a comedy/satire). It’s about the push and pull between the impulses to conserve and to push forward, about how this year’s revolutionary is next year’s institution. Perfidia (she’s”perfidious,” not actually capable of committing to anything) comes from “a long line of revolutionaries.” Her family’s tradition is the institution of revolution. It’s all a paradox, if not just an open contradiction. The revolutionaries shout all of today’s fun slogans. Ant-ICE, anti-abortion, pro-Black power and complete female independence (even from family, their own children), have to point out that the founding fathers owned slaves. And given their way, they’d enforce their beliefs just as violently as the old guys (who also spout very contemporary slogans about immigration enforcement), old conservatives who secretly long for that sexy, sexy revolution, and the revolution longs to put on the hat of the institution, and, the movie seems to say, so on til the end of time. As Perfidia herself says, “Every revolution begins fighting demons, but mfers end up just fighting themselves.” There are lots of these moments where the Revolutionaries and the Government are one and the same (whether the very obvious sexual attraction in the opening sequence or the soldier telling the revolutionary he wouldn’t be scared either if he was in his shoes, or the fact that the government and the revolutionaries each have their own respective witness protection programs, or the fact that Dicaprio’s character oscillates between revolutionary fervor and conservative dad-ism, or the Revolutionaries being super bureaucratic, or the fact that the daughter might be Leo’s, might be Lockjaws, but it’s kind of impossible to tell because they’re really two sides of the same coin). In the end, it’s the Conservative figure who holds fast to his ideals/beliefs, and the Revolutionary figure who spends his days smoking pot and taking selfies.

I mean, this is a movie with Coca Cola and Modelo and Dodge product placement. It’s not exactly revolutionary itself. Though considering the reactions to the movie from both sides, I may be totally wrong. The liberals have embraced it like a manifesto, and the conservatives have decried it as, well, a manifesto. Maybe I’m just totally wrong. But it’s all such a symptom of our way too political and partisan time that no one would see a satire as a satire, especially when the satire is specifically about how crazy and partisan everything currently is.

It doesn’t help that Pynchon pulls his stories off with a lot of zany, paranoid humor, something Anderson doesn’t seem really capable of doing. These types of 2-dimensional cartoon characters with symbolic names who belong to “The French 75” and “The Christmas Adventurers Club” (who recently mourned the loss of their member, Jim Kringle) do great for comedy, but Anderson shoots them all like it’s a character drama, and Greenwood’s super-serious neo-classical score doesn’t help (not sure a member of Radiohead has ever smiled). I feel like it would have been better as a Coen Brothers movie, or the Kubrick of Dr. Strangelove. Leo seems to be the only one who intuits that, turning in a very funny performance.

Because of how topical it is, it will be celebrated this year/next year, but because of how it fails to really communicate its humor, not being nearly funny enough consistently enough, or its more perennial concerns about the cyclical nature of things, no one will remember it in ten years’ time.

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition. Thus we have two great types — the advanced person who rushes us into ruin, and the retrospective person who admires the ruins. He admires them especially by moonlight, not to say moonshine. Each new blunder of the progressive or prig becomes instantly a legend of immemorial antiquity for the snob. This is called the balance, or mutual check, in our Constitution.”
― G.K. Chesterton