ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (2025)

While it’s a fool’s errand to expect Oscar’s Best Pic of the Year to be the best pic of the year, recent years have further degraded the award into a Buyer’s Remorse contest.  What title has curdled fastest?  One recent ‘winner’ took the remorse card while they were still handing out the prize!  So credit to Paul Thomas Anderson for winning the little man on a film that’s holding up.  Yippee!  (As for best of the year . . . ?)  Loosely built on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, VINELAND, the main action takes place seventeen years after a prologue detailing the inner-workings of a Weather Underground-like group of American Radical Left terrorists.  A problem here since 17 years prior to Pynchon’s 1990 novel would put those events in ‘the ‘Seventies.’  But when exactly are they happening here?   PTA refuses to pin this down to any specific year, but it plays as if it’s seventeen years before now.  That’s 2008, the year Obama was elected.  After that, we follow Leonardo DiCaprio’s time tamed terrorist, now a laid-back paranoid (if that’s possible), a single dad whose daughter pooh-poohs his vigilance against unchecked Fed danger till they each come under attack by various shadowy quasi-government authorities.  Mainly a force under orders from unforgiving DiCaprio rival Sean Penn, overdoing it by letting his inner Dustin Hoffman out in the film’s only bad perf.  (Naturally winning the film’s sole acting Oscar®.)  It soon escalates into a (not-quite) innocent-man-on-the-run (with daughter) picaresque, with PTA doing a swell job of keeping all parties (left/right), action, and prey vs. hunter set-pieces straight.  For once, you don’t need a scorecard.  As an old Party Line pal, still in the game helping ‘illegals’ avoid arrest, Benicio Del Toro is revivified, eyes wide-open and just about stealing the pic.  He also looks like he might be DiCaprio's cousin from certain angles.  (This a mixed blessing as DiCaprio, also from certain angles, looks like Elisha Cook, Jr.  No kiddin’.)  Shot largely in the old VistaVision format, PTA uses the extra-clarity to juggle loads of moving pieces and intersecting action that make the film play less like heightened true-to-life drama than living Venn Diagram.  If only he knew when to end the thing.  Flaws and all, this is deservedly PTA’s first film since 2007's THERE WILL BE BLOOD to work critically & commercially.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  Paid to the location scout who found a perfect ultra-dippy section of hilly two-lane rural highway to set the action finale on.  (Where have I seen this stretch of road before?)