The props designer did a good job. The kind of shapeless reddish check dressing gown in which Leonardo DiCaprio appears during most of his eventful adventures will undoubtedly enter the museum of the most singular and memorable panoplies of heroes.
Hero? Bob Ferguson, who sixteen years earlier was the artificer of a small far-left terrorist group and the lover of its charismatic leader, the volcanic Perfidia Beverly Hills, is now apparently the opposite. A nice wreck abusing opiates and alcohol, but taking care of her teenage daughter, Willa, as best she can.
The young mixed race has all the talents and qualities, including those of her age such as rebelling in principle against the instructions of her parents, including the principles of clandestinity of which Bob partly retains the precepts and reflexes, just in case…
The case will present itself, in the hypersteroidal and truly nasty appearance of the special forces colonel played by Sean Penn, this aptly named Lockjaw who once had a dazzling carnal relationship – at least for him – with Perfidia. Today, the colonel mobilizes the full power of the forces of American repression to find what he believes to be his daughter, Willa, for reasons that only make this odious character even worse.
Along with other names for the characters, it was the main plot of the novel by the great American writer Thomas Pynchon, Vinelandpublished in 1990. The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson also worked well (as usual), in the sense that he built on this canvas a succession of very spectacular sequences, with colorful characters and memorable action scenes.
We will particularly remember the presence, even fleeting, of Perfidia (musician and performer Teyana Taylor), or of Benicio del Toro as Sensei Sergio, master of a dojo, beer drinker and organizer of a network for the protection of undocumented immigrants.
And if the two main male figures are deliberately caricatured in the form of comic strip figurines (sluggish SpongeBob and the tough-as-nails Colonel Lockjaw), the female characters, all black or mixed-race women, are always filmed with attention and finesse, including the very beautiful interpretation of young Willa by Chase Infinity.
We will remember the pursuit on a straight road undulating like a giant corrugated iron sheet, the final piece of bravery at the end of a chase fertile in antics, incendiary dialogues and explosions of violence of various calibers. And we will have appreciated the mixture of burlesque, action and denunciation of various figures of the alt-right made in USA.
America without Americans
However, despite the brilliant execution, the gags where Leonardo DiCaprio pedals through the semolina of his illegal past and the impressive landscapes, One battle after another leaves a taste of disappointment, for reasons that could be formulated from the change of title, from the novel to the film.
There is no question here of demanding fidelity in principle to the book, an adaptation is free to invent what it wants from a literary text. But in this particular case, the major transformations made by screenwriter and director Paul Thomas Anderson lead to unfortunate effects.
For Thomas Pynchon, whose novel takes place in the 1980s saturated with flashbacks to the 1960s, Vineland was the name of an (imaginary) county where a large community of former members of the rebel generation of sixtiesamong whom the father and daughter had come to settle.
That the book bore the name of a territory – and of a large and diverse community – points by contrast to what is missing in One battle after another. The film takes place in America, but there are no Americans. There are two groups, one of more or less folkloric leftist guerrillas, more or less organized in revolts, and one of fascist activists, directly linked to the army and the political and financial powers. No longer a shapeless troop of Latinos, harassed by these, defended by those.
This narrative purity, very useful in terms of effective dramatization, places the film in the series of pseudo-critiques of the current United States based on a simplistic confrontation, which does not help in any way to understand what is at stake. Today in the land of Donald Trump. A film without people and without territory, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature film claims to be in the present, invokes a host of political codes and does nothing with them.
An adaptation that lacks depth
The title One battle after another also programs a linear alignment, which is the exact opposite of what Thomas Pynchon did, a large part of whose literary genius lies in his way of complexifying situations, of constantly bringing out reflections and echoes, of composing narratives in multiple dimensions, particularly temporal.
Yes, but here we are, we are still in Hollywood. It has to be clear, there has to be a narrative line that doesn’t lose anyone along the way. It is not only the richness of the story with multiple protagonists that disappears, it is the existence of any collective idea, of any inscription in a story which is not just a pretext.
And to complete the whole thing, we are going to add a good dose of very conformist and reassuring familialist ideology, after having played with transgressive and protesting gadgets and having vigorously affirmed that postmodern Klu Klux Klan version racism and the confinement of human beings is naughty.
The transposition to the present, a present terribly different from the period in which the book took place, would however have required much more than the skill of a narrator and a showman, a skill with which Paul Thomas Anderson is amply endowed.
Inspired by a great book devoted to another situation, and which did so with a richness and depth completely flattened here, the film held the promise of contributing, with the means of fiction, the romantic, the spectacular, to help understand a little of what is happening now in the United States. We are far from it.
