One Battle After Another

I went into this film not knowing a great deal about it, other than it was this year's Oscar winner. It opens with an audacious raid by a rag tag left wing revolutionary group on an immigration camp on the Mexican border to free prisoners being held there. Whilst Pat (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is seemingly in charge of little more than letting off some celebratory fireworks his partner, the marvellously named Perfida Beverley Hills (Teyanna Taylor) sexually humiliates the camp commandant Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). 

After an attempted bombing, Perfida is intercepted by Lockjaw who it seems has a fetishistic obsession with her and blackmails her into meeting for sex. She winds up pregnant, but this doesn't seem to quench her revolutionary fervour (one striking shot shows her heavily pregnant and joyfully firing an automatic rifle), and after giving birth to a daughter she returns to the fight and is finally arrested during a bank raid. 

Cut to 16 years later. Pat is now living off grid under an alias as Bob with daughter Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). Lockjaw has been invited to join a secretive White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club so determines to hunt down Willa to hide any evidence that he might once have had an interracial relationship. Hijinks and ultra violence ensue.

I'm still not sure quite what to make of this film. There are obvious parallels with the current situation with right wing racist paramilitaries hunting down immigrants and carrying out summary executions of undesirables. However, the revolutionaries seem to be more rooted in the radical chic of the 1970s than contemporary movements like Antifa. The film was adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon which was set between the late 60s and 1984, which might explain this though.

There is an uneasy tension between the truly vile politics of the Christmas Adventurers and almost farcical/slapstick humour as acid casualty Pat tries and fails to remember his identifying passcodes, worries about charging his phone, and then falls off a roof to be tasered by the police whilst on the run. 

The film is also on the long side at over two and half hours, cramming an awful lot of stuff in there with some great action sequences and car chases that feel almost grafted in from a classic 70s style thriller. The score by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead is also worthy of note and underpins the action nicely.

Not what I was expecting, but worth a watch.