I think 2025 was a watershed moment in recent cinematic history.
The year was littered with releases that spoke to many Americans from different backgrounds. While I think a movie like “Sinners” spoke hard truths about race relations in our current political climate against the horrors of the Jim Crow South, I think another movie mirrored our society’s current strife.
Like “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another” mirrored our contentious societal problems. While “Sinners” spoke to the Black experience in America, “One Battle After Another” explored the deep issues plaguing the country’s immigration scene. Both films accomplish their goals in a way only movies can: through constant entertainment.
“One Battle After Another” may come across as a rowdy stoner comedy spliced with action, but the movie expresses so much more, making it one of the best movies and most diverse of the decade. Leonardo DiCaprio is the name brand of this movie, along with veterans like Sean Penn and Benicio Del Toro, but at its core, newcomer Chase Infiniti was the heart, soul, and future of this world.
Infiniti represents the present and future of a world that is skewing more toward mixed races. Sean Penn’s racist Lockjaw hunts her character.
I think Lockjaw is the epitome of racial tension and hypocrisy in America. On the outside, he embodies the learned behavior that Black people or people of color are subhuman. But his character is obsessed with Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia. Why is that? Is it that he believes his pursuit of her is a form of control over the race? Doesn’t his obsession with her go against everything he believes and stands for?
The hypocrisy is thick, and to the bigger point, it makes so much sense in how race relations appear in our country. At one point, Lockjaw reveals to DiCaprio’s Bob that he loves Black women. As I digested the movie, I continued wondering whether that is truly the case. Is it about control over a race, or is there something more, something less?
Director Paul Thomas Anderson asks difficult questions. He challenges us to try and understand these characters in a world where we don’t always understand a person’s motivation.
In one particular scene toward the third act, Lockjaw and Infiniti’s Willa are inside a church chapel. Great directors ratchet up tension in movies like “One Battle After Another,” and here, Anderson does just that. You are on the edge of your seat waiting to see whether a line is straight or not, determ, waiting to see whether a line is straight or not, to determine whetherining if Lockjaw, not Bob, is Willa’s real father.
The racial interplay goes beyond Lockjaw and Willa. Del Toro’s Sensei Sergio brings a humorous, if defeated, approach to race relations. While he and Bob are driving, cracking a couple of beers and trying to figure out how to get to Willa, the two are tailed by police. Bob jumps from the car, and police either are blind to him doing so or are only focused on Sergio, the driver.
When Sergio comes to a stop for police, he unfortunately knows the drill. Maybe a bit tipsy, Sergio has fun with his arrest. He turns and walks toward the officer’s voice with a little dance in his step as he shows the officersrealize he has no weapons and means no harm. The scene is likely to make you laugh out loud until you come to the realization that this is likely not Sergio’s first run-in with police. I wondered how police would have addressed Bob if he, a white male, had been in Sergio’s shoes.
Tension builds to a fever pitch throughout the film, from a rooftop scene that plays like a ripped-from-the-headlines police-versus-public brawl. The city’s streets plume with smoke, everyone is running from police, and Bob gets tasered for comic relief.
After walking out of the theater, one of the first things I said was that this is Anderson’s funniest film. But the humor acts as an awkward mask to the problems going on in our society.
Even when Lockjaw gets his comeuppance in the third act, his demise should be tempered by the knowledge that people far worse than him remain, and the cycle of racism will continue.
Bob and Perfidia were members of the French 75 revolutionary group. That group didn’t last long in the grand scheme of fighting for human rights — they were eventually overpowered. I think that left Perfidia defeated, causing her to turn away from her goals of equality. Taylor was nominated for an Oscar for her supporting performance, as she deserved. Watching her come in so strong, shot out of a cannon in an intense and energetic opening 20 minutes, only to see her work amount to nothing, is another way to think about how the fight for equality can take a toll.
I think Anderson’s goal here was to look ahead at what could be with new fighters like Willa. That’s why her role is essential to the film, and why it was a stroke of genius to cast Infiniti in her first film role. At the beginning of the film, she is naïve and reluctant to join the fight. But her journey educates both her and us on the deep-rooted problems in our country and what it means to be a mixed-race woman in an unforgiving world.
At the end, the washed-up revolutionary Bob watches his daughter become the next wave of revolutionary, one who could help change our country. It’s an ending that makes us hope, while still understanding the difficulties at play.
