There are days that feel like this, even when ICE aren't after you
dir: Paul Thomas Anderson
2025
I never thought I’d live long enough to see Paul Thomas Anderson make another great movie. I keep being told that he’s made lots of great movies since Boogie Nights, but mostly I’ve found his films since then to be extremely frustrating.
With the advantage of time I think there have been occasions where I haven’t been that fair, or been generous enough to accept that no flicks, whether PT Anderson’s or not, have to perfectly conform with my expectations in order to actually be good or not. It’s just that it had become for me a major stumbling block with his movies, whereby there would inevitably be an aspect of it, or, in the case of There Will Be Blood or The Master, a final section so bonkers that it made me question whatever merits I thought I’d experienced up to that point.
I’ve long known above movies having terrible endings because sometimes directors just don’t know how to end their stories, but rarely do I experience endings that make me hate the whole fucking movie.
That rare honour is Anderson’s, in that I’ve felt duped multiple times by his filmography, even more times than by M. Night Shyamalan.
Well, as usual, an unasked for preamble saying the opposite of what I want to say about a movie: this is a strong movie, with an ending that doesn’t sink the whole endeavour or render it embarrassing, one that I enjoyed / was thrilled by almost from beginning to end. It’s got some great characters, it’s got some insanely great performances; it depicts the recognisable slide into authoritarianism that we see playing out in the States under the guise of border enforcement, and yet it’s not at all about the current ICE goon squads rounding up anyone vaguely ethnic looking, whether citizens or not, or about the MAGA fuckheads explicitly. It’s about the excitement, the thrill of revolution and rebellion in the 60s-70s which gave way to disillusionment and destruction when it all turned to shit.
And it’s about a secretive cabal of white supremacists trying to recruit a new member to their Christmas Adventurers Club.
I suspect that the last detail I mentioned, when I was younger, would have been one of those elements that pulled me out of the willing suspension of disbelief aspects of enjoying a film, that would have convinced me that PT Anderson was taking the piss and insulting us idiots in the audience for enjoying his flick in the first place. It is almost so goofy and so out of place that, yeah, it nearly did the trick.
But I guess I just enjoyed the rest of the flick too much for it to be a dealbreaker.
The ‘action’ and the film start something like sixteen years ago, but it’s meant to feel like forty years ago. The aesthetics, the rhetoric, the actions this radical group French 75 take, are meant to recall the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, any of the radical leftist / Marxist groups that thought direct action, like blowing up politician’s offices or robbing banks, was somehow going to make the average American rise up and show Nixon to the door or the guillotine. Instead it paved the way for the rise of Reagan and neo-liberalism.
The leader of French 75 calls herself Perfidia Beverly Hills, and she conducts herself as a glorious combination of every Blaxploitation heroine crossed with every current female rapper that happily wields their sexuality as a weapon as powerful as any machinegun, which she also wields at several points.
Perfidia is played by Teyana Taylor, who is a formidable and sometimes terrifying actor. She strides through the flick with leonine grace, and is aggressively sexualised by both the premise and the camera. We watch as she leads a successful attack on a migrant detention camp, freeing the people being held there, and sexually humiliating the jerk in charge of the place, called Lockjaw (Sean Penn).
Whatever it is that she has done to him, he becomes absolutely obsessed with her, and down the track creates a situation where it is in her interests to grace him with her affections, let’s say.
At the same time she seems to be in a relationship with another member of the French 75, being Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio), who manages explosives and firework distractions when the rest of the crew are doing their thing blowing things up or threatening bank employees with guns and their outsized sexual confidence. Everything is hunky dory until it isn’t, which involves Perfidia murdering a bank guard, and then the rest of the crew being murdered or arrested by the authorities, depending on how they feel on a given day.
And she’s pregnant. What’s a revolutionary to do? Well, when the baby arrives, and she feels nothing for it, and in fact she starts to resent it because Pat is so focussed on the newborn’s wellbeing, she fucks the fuck off, only to be saved/coerced by Lockjaw into turning into a snitch in order to save herself.
Pat and Charlene, through the network of activists and revolutionaries, scamper and rebuild in a completely new place, and then sixteen years pass.
Pat is now Bob, and Charlene has been brought up under the name Willa. She doesn’t know anything about her mum, but hears the legend. Bob is a depressed, booze and drug addled derelict, but at least they live their lives of quiet desperation away from the maddening crowd.
Until, of course, for the most absurd of reasons, their idyll comes to an end.
Bob is rightly paranoid, because there are people out to get him, but he doesn’t realise that they’re more so after Willa, for the dumbest of reasons (in order to gain entry to an exclusive club of top quality government-linked racists, Lockjaw has to eradicate any potential evidence that he might have had sex with a Black woman, given the potential that Willa is his child, and not Pat’s / Bob’s).
And so begins a stunning invasion of one’s own country, under the pretence of national security / domestic law and order, as Lockjaw’s goons attack and roundup everyone they feel like attacking.
And if you think that’s implausible, let me jog your memory by referring to all the governmental fuckery currently going on, where National Guardsmen from various states, and masked ICE goons, many of whom wouldn’t be able to pass any security or Working with Children checks, are rounding up people from factories, churches, schools, hospitals, Home Depot carparks or from their own homes, in some instances deporting people they know are citizens to countries they’ve never been to before, and have no connection to. And it’s all done for shits and giggles.
This all plays out, over what is a lengthy running time, in an incredibly tense and energising manner. The soundtrack probably helps (perhaps too much) by keeping things rolling along at a fair clip, but it also keeps our anxiety pretty high, because of course it does (Jonny Greenwood strikes again, having scored a few of Anderson’s flicks when he’s not slumming it with the other members of Radiohead). I say “energising” because it didn’t leave me feeling exhausted at the end, even though by all rights I should have been. This is not a predictable flick, even for those who’ve seen Anderson’s other flicks, or read Pynchon’s Vineland, which this is very loosely based on, because while it may have a fair bit of action, I wouldn’t really call it an action flick.
In the same way that the flick posits that there is not only an open force actively working against its citizens and their interests, the film populates its world with a perhaps not equal but no less dedicated force of people opposing the authorities and looking out for (some) people, alternative networks set up like the underground railroad of yore. Except now they have ways of escape both above and below ground.
When everything goes to absolute shit, and the network that remembers the legends of French 75 swoops in to try and help Willa, and eventually Bob, what becomes obvious right from the start is that however well-meaning Bob may be, however much he may love Willa, he’s a wrenched and riddled disaster of a human being that can barely function in the modern world, let alone the old revolutionary one. DiCaprio’s performance, I would argue, is mostly a comedic one, in a flick that doesn’t feel like a comedy most of the time. Watching him fumbling around with a 1G ye olde worlde mobile phone trying to get a charge and a signal is hilarious and exasperating. Watching him trying to remember the passphrases required to confirm his identity with the old network is comically tragic, or tragically comic, one or the other, or both.
For sixteen years his only purpose has been to hide Willa and himself from the Powers that Be, and with Willa gone he’s got nothing, but believes he can do something meaningful if only he can get to a rendezvous point.
Now that’s magical thinking. Beyond magical thinking, the last part of the flick, requires magical plotting, and people doing things for reasons that don’t make a lot of sense. I don’t feel great about how that stuff comes about, but when it comes together, ye gods, what an ending.
That last car chase, however much or little of it Anderson would admit to is something of a homage to 70s car chase classics like Two Lane Blacktop or Vanishing Point, or the earlier Bullitt, is astounding. You can start, afterwards, picking it apart logically, but there’s nothing that detracts from how it feels.
Chase Infiniti plays Willa, or Charlene as she was known at birth, and she is an absolute firecracker. She manages to get across the steely ferociousness of the mother she’s never met, along with a practical, contemporary intention to do right by the people she cares about. Her scenes with Penn are tremendous, but also deeply unsettling, whereas her scenes with DiCaprio are sweet and exasperating.
All the performances are great, all the weird little details thrown in and around – the night time run across the rooftops by that crew of skaters; the way Willa’s friends protect her privacy and location from the fascist goons, the way Bob can’t seem to get the pronouns right with one of Willa’s non-binary friends, the way Bob himself is somewhat racist when he speaks to certain people of certain backgrounds, despite his stance as an egalitarian revolutionary, the way that he’s been trying to protect Willa for so long, but wasn’t confident enough to confide in her, leading as it does to her natural rebellion against her constraints; the sweaty and clumsy way Bob does almost everything, the entire performance that Benicio del Toro is responsible for in this flick as a martial arts sensei who is also a pillar of the community; the harsh nuns where Willa camps out for a while, who grow dope and shoot guns for fun: It’s a strange world as conjured, but one I enjoyed spending time in.
Oh, and the odd detail that one of Bob’s favourite routines is getting stoned and watching The Battle of Algiers over and over again, I’m hoping, on a VHS tape, that’s so perfect. That makes so much sense for this character perpetually living in the past and dreaming of making a positive, revolutionary difference in this world.
I guess a strong part of this flick is asking about who gets to make a positive difference in the world. The French 75 revolutionaries certainly achieved less than nothing, other than some romantic, grand gestures, feeling good about themselves and all that crashed to the ground when they murdered a security guard, Perfidia betrayed them and then fucked off. They were never doing it for any grand ideals or for the “people”; Perfidia clearly only did stuff because it turned her on and flattered her ego.
Lockjaw, in a performance by Sean Penn so loathsome that I often had to look away from the screen when he was on it, clearly makes a change to the world, but entirely in the negative, visiting misery on untold thousands of people under the guise of enforcing the law, but it’s all in the service of one awful person’s weird fixations. If anyone could be said, beyond ideology or utopian beliefs, to be making a positive change in the world it’s the networks of people (outside of the French 75 old timers) trying to help other people go places within the States who are making a positive change as represented by the del Toro character Sergio, and all the countless people who make that possible.
Isn’t it ironic, just to imitate Alanis Morissette for a sec?
The fact that this flick seems like it’s commenting on the present moment is one of those things you can’t plan for; its prescience / timeliness is just staggeringly coincidental. But the flick is enjoyable on an array of other levels beyond, so hopefully at a time when white supremacy is tamped down a bit post- that orange emperor, the flick will still be enjoyable as an artwork to a relieved global audience.
Thoroughly enjoyable flick that should be seen on the biggest screen possible, in one continuous sitting. This is the way.
8 times wanting to speak to the manager finally paid off, Karen, out of 10
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“Are you happy? Do you have love? What will you do when you get older? Will you try to change the world like I did? We failed, but maybe you will not. Maybe you will be the one who puts the world right.” - that’s all we can hope for any of our kids, but it’s a fair bit of pressure - One Battle After Another
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