One Battle After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio

Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another is the most propulsive and exciting American film since Weapons. I have a few issues with the film, but it confirms Anderson's status as one of the leading Hollywood filmmakers of his generation. The script by Anderson was inspired by Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland, but One Battle After Another, unlike Anderson's film of Inherent Vice, differs considerably from the novel. The book is set in 1984 amidst the Reagan era war on drugs. The film begins in 2010 or so, but is mostly set in the present. Thus, the leftover 60s mythos of armed radical groups seems a little out of place to me. Anderson replaces drug dealing with other American bugbears: chiefly immigration and miscegenation. That said, the protagonist played by Leonardo DiCaprio smokes as much weed during the course of the film as Doc Sportello did in Inherent Vice.

Thankfully, Anderson has changed the name of the hipneck protagonist to Bob Ferguson instead of the overly absurd Zoyd Wheeler. I must say that I find Pynchon's humor to be his greatest defect as an artist. Mad magazine satire for PHDs that is funnier in theory than in practice. Anderson, though, is similar in his approach to humor to Pynchon, which makes him a good fit, for good and ill. The endless japes in the film about Bob not remembering his password strikes the appropriate stoner chord, but are never particularly funny. Mentions of Bedford Forrest and Throckmorton are learned, but will not draw chuckles. Anderson does a good job pruning an even more convoluted and distended novel than Inherent Vice. One Battle After Another builds in momentum much better than the ramshackle novel ever did. Anderson has acknowledged the influence of The Searchers upon his film's main plot, a father's search for his daughter. In this case it is Bob searching for his kick-ass daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). To complicate matters and set up a frenzy of cross-cutting, Willa is pursued by others including the evil racist Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) who functions, in more ways than one, as this film's "Scar".

One Battle After Another seizes upon another Fordian motif from The Searchers: the reclamation of lost knowledge. In the Ford film, it is a location known to native lore, but not found on the white man's map. In the Anderson film, long out of date cell phones and pagers help Bob and his cohorts keep one step ahead of the man. As usual, there is more than one influence at play on an Anderson film. The culminating violent chase sequence owes a lot to films like Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, and Two Lane Blacktop. Like those films, One Battle After Another envelops you in how it feels going 100mph wheels eating up a desert highway. The picture also owes a debt to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s like The Parallax View. As in that film, there is a cabal of corporate white dudes pulling strings. So, Bob is justified in his paranoia. Anderson magnifies this feeling of paranoia with an extensive use of extreme close-ups, a technique I usually abhor, but which I feel is appropriate in this case. No one will call Sean Penn vain after the way Anderson has framed his grizzled visage in this flick. 

Chase Infiniti

What has always humanized Anderson's films, no matter how chilly or outlandish, is his warm regard towards and rapport with his players. Character parts, no matter how small, are never tossed off in an Anderson film.  A child of the industry, Anderson's love of actors is intermingled with his love for humanity. DiCaprio responds with his most virtuoso performance since The Wolf of Wall Street. Benicio del Toro, as Willa's dojo sensei, shows off his inner warmth that was so absent in The Phoenician Scheme. Penn does his best to enliven a one dimensional villain, he is, at least, a memorable gargoyle. The best surprise is how dexterous, both physically and verbally, Chase Infinite is. She more than holds her own with the Oscar winners. There are also a host of fine supporting performances from Teyana Taylor, Regina King, Tony Goldwyn, Eric Schweig, Junglepussy, and Kevin Tighe. The score by Johnny Greenwood is his best since There Will Be Blood.

I suppose I can't take One Battle After Another too seriously as a political statement. I find the dichotomies laid out by the film to be overly broad and false. but maybe the film is more satire than the action thriller it was advertised as. At one point, Anderson invokes Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers as a model of revolutionary struggle, but the contrast with that film does One Battle After Another no favors. Pontecorvo, though a committed Marxist, allows the agents of colonial power some degree of ambiguity. The world of One Battle After Another has no room for such nuance. You are either part of the white Christian ruling class or are against them. The tracking shots through immigrant detention centers holding women and children show what side the director is on. When Willa departs from her Dad at the close of the movie, to the strains of Tom Petty's "American Girl", we all know that she is off to join the resistance.

 

Happy Times

Zhao Benshan and Dong Jie

Zhang Yimou's Happy Times is a comic melodrama first released in China in 2000. The protagonist is an unemployed factory worker named Zhao (Zhao Benshan) who lives in the port city of Dalian. We first meet Zhao as he is courting a zaftig divorcee (Lifan Dong) who lives in a crowded apartment with her corpulent son and a blind stepdaughter, Wu Ying (Dong Jie), who she mistreats. Zhao is posing as a well to do manager of a hotel in order to win the divorcee, but his lies will catch up to him. The divorcee charges him with finding a job and new digs for Wu Ying at his non-existent hotel. Zhao enlists his friends, most of whom are retired, to find a solution. They convert an abandoned bus in a local park into a pad for trysting lovers with the intention of using Wu Ying as a maid to clean up the mess the couples leave.

The love shack, which is dubbed the Happy Times Hut, proves viable for only a short time. Wu Ying's stepmother finds another, genuinely wealthy suitor, but shows no interest in taking Wu Ying back. Zhao has taken an avuncular interest in Wu Ying and she responds to his kindness. Learning that she is a skilled masseuse, Zhao sets up a phony massage parlor for her to "work" in at an abandoned factory. Unbeknownst to Zhao, Wu Ying cottons to what is really going on fairly early. However, she plays along, happy to stay useful and enjoying the company of Zhao's friends who impersonate "clients".

The film was loosely adapted by Gui Zi from short story by Mo Yan. Some critics at the time, like Roger Ebert, found the basic premise of Happy Times to be both manipulative and overly sentimental. However, I think the characters suspension of disbelief concerning the faux massage parlor is designed to reflect that of the audience watching the film. Deception is central to both processes. Zhao is a bounder, but he is essentially good-hearted. The parallels to Chaplin's tramp, always helpful to blind girls, children, and the dispossessed, are fairly obvious. Like the tramp, Zhao's grifts are more amusing than sinister. Both the tramp and Zhao exist in hostile landscapes where a little rebellion is understandable. Zhao exists in a land that features the worst of both worlds: the regimented authoritarianism of state socialism alongside the indifference to the impoverished of capitalism.

Chiefly, I found the film to be a good hang. The rhythm of the film feels pokey at times, but Yimou frames his ensemble scenes well, enabling the audience to gauge various characters' reaction simultaneously. Yimou also utilizes color imaginatively, particularly red as a harbinger of romantic hope. The two leads are both wondrous, engaging our empathy without grandstanding. What is most remarkable is how the film never tips over into bathos despite an ending the verges on tragedy. 

Reap the Wild Wind

Raymond Massey and John Wayne

Cecil B. DeMille's Reap the Wild Wind is a Technicolor action romance set in Key West in 1840. Sometimes dismissed as hokum, I found it to be a fairly rousing epic, at least for the first two thirds. The opener is one of DeMille's best as Paulette Goddard spies a ship wreck, ditches her hoop skirt for breeches, and proceeds to rescue the ship's captain played by John Wayne. Soon, Goddard is in a love triangle with Wayne, the man of action, and maritime lawyer Ray Milland, a more rational being. Each has a mascot or pet that represents the character in caricature. Wayne has a pet monkey named Bananas who is all raging id. Milland's pet is a lapdog named Romulus representing domesticated fido fidelity. Milland had top billing, so guess who gets the girl?

The film is set amidst the nascent US shipping industry, particularly its salvage fleet, as it shifts to steam power. The primary villain of the film, the most cutthroat of the salvagers who instigates the film's skullduggery, is played by a perfectly cast Raymond Massey. Robert Preston plays Massey's brother. He is effective as is Susan Hayward who plays his lover in the film's secondary romance. From the very first shot, a bald eagle figurehead on a ship's prow, DeMille invests his material with colorful splashes of early Americana. As Remington provided a model for the look of John Ford's Westerns, N.C. Wyeth provides one, particularly in his illustrations and paintings of pirates, for DeMille to duplicate here. Whenever a dash of red is needed to provide tonal balance or variety, voila a parrot appears. Reap the Wild Wind is always interesting to look at even when certain aspects of it have dated, like its racial typing and its giant rubber squid. However, the backdrop effects, mostly matte paintings and rear projection, are still impressive and attractive.

DeMille liked to research the look of the eras in his films, and it pays off to great effect in Reap the Wild Wind's ball sequence, but he was no more a realist than Ford. As the critical taste for realism increased after World War 2, DeMille and Ford's reputations both declined a bit. In Reap the Wild Wind, based on a Saturday Evening Post story which was then rewritten by a host of scribes, DeMille attempted to craft an American legend to gird his country for the coming conflict. In the trailer for the film, narrated by the director himself, the need for the safety of American sea lanes is pointedly trumpeted. Since the passage of the Lend-Lease bill, America, officially neutral, had seen its merchant marine fleet under attack by German U-boats in the Atlantic. By the time of the film's release in 1942, America was officially at war. 

Another influence on Reap the Wild Wind was the success of Gone With The Wind. The rapport between Paulette Goddard and Louise Beavers tries too hard to mimic the one between Vivian Leigh and Hattie McDaniel in the earlier picture. Instead of fiddle-dee-dee, Goddard gets to intone "fiddlesticks". Goddard was once thought to be one of the favorites for the role of Scarlett O'Hara and Reap the Wild Wind gives a sense of what might have been. Her southern accent is shaky, but Goddard plays a feisty hunk magnet with elan. Wayne is stolidly dependable and Milland quite good as a character that is labeled at one point a "namby-pamby". Charles Bickford is wonderful as a grizzled whaler, but disappears after a single sequence. Similarly, Oscar Polk, who was a servant in Gone With The Wind, has an effective cameo as "Salt Meat". Hedda Hopper is well cast as a biddy perpetually on the verge of a faint. It may be patriotic hokum, but Reap the Wild Wind is also engrossing cinema that still feels more vital than most modern fare.