The
vibes were old-fashioned on a night when the big winners were putatively
progressive. Paul Thomas Anderson gave one acceptance speech after
another—three in all, for writing, directing, and producing One Battle After
Another, a worthier than usual best picture winner. But as he went on, he
got further away from political commentary on behalf of a movie both praised
and prodded for its political content, and into sentimentality and nostalgia.
“I wrote [it] for my kids, to say sorry for the housekeeping mess that we left
in this world we’re handing off to them,” the Studio City kid said after
winning best adapted screenplay, leaving little ambiguity as to the meaning of OBAA’s
coda, wherein Leonardo DiCaprio’s battle-weary bomber, Bob Ferguson, relaxes
on the couch while his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) heads into the fray on
his behalf. Anderson has tended to leave his movies open to interpretation,
carving hairline fractures into their immaculate surfaces—and I’d preferred to
think that the film’s final image of a revolutionary relaxing with a selfie
complicated the movie’s own strange sense of complacency; that I still do is a
case of trusting the tale and not the teller (or maybe playing favorites).
By
the time PTA was in position to get the last word on the last year in cinema,
accepting the best picture award, he opted to talk about the superlative best picture nominees of 1975: Jaws, Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, and
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a murderer’s row of potentially
deserving winners proffered as an example of how silly it is to split hairs
over quality. His speech also played up the Way We Were in the ’70s—a decade
Anderson has returned to, with fetishistic determination, time and again.
Including, as it happens, in One Battle After Another, which
superimposes certain modes and moods of the New Hollywood—including and
especially its dalliances with radical chic—over a narrative set in a
stealthily dystopian version of the twenty-first century. Anderson’s films often have
clearly marked hinge moments, but One Battle After Another cultivates
confusion about when it takes place; one hint that we’re in the present comes
when Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance With Me” soundtracks high school
dances. The movie’s middle-age girl dad’s heart, though, bleeds for Steely Dan
and Tom Petty.
In
the weeks leading up to the awards, commentators predictably positioned One
Battle After Another and its fellow front-runner, Sinners, as rival
heavyweights in a zeitgeist title fight: a symbolic sequel to the Moonlight–La
La Land discourse wars of 2017. One way to read Ryan Coogler’s surprise
early-summer blockbuster is as a
cautionary tale about cultural appropriation: “We will make beautiful
music together,” promises Jack O’Connell’s pale, assimilationist vampire before
moving to feast on the patrons at an African American speakeasy. That fear of
letting the wrong one in—or leeching off the lifeblood of others—mirrors
critical skepticism around Anderson’s racialized reenvisioning of Thomas
Pynchon’s Vineland, a novel without significant Black characters
(Pynchon’s Frenesi Gate becomes the film’s Perfidia Beverly Hills). For every
critic celebrating PTA’s willingness after a series of bespoke period pieces to
square up to the present, there was another insisting his car-chase epic should
have stayed more in its lane. But One Battle After Another and Sinners
also have plenty in common: They’re both genre exercises caught in
time warps of their own making.
