What’s to be done when the revolution fails, but the revolutionary lives on? Do they pickle themselves in some quiet place and watch their tainted world roll by? Or do they turn, graciously, to the next generation and say, “Maybe you will be the one to put this world to right”? It’s the phrase that brings Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another to its emphatic, timely conclusion. For all its scale and swaggering sense of power, it’s a film that recognises with clarity what it means to exist as an entire human being under the hand of white supremacy. To resist is to live and to live is to resist.
There will be a lot of talk in the coming months about whether this is Anderson’s masterpiece. I’m not convinced it’s his best film – there’s something about The Master (2012) that I’ve never been able to shake. But, for Anderson, it’s as definitive an artist’s statement as Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, though he’s looking resolutely forward where his contemporary looked back.
