Paul Thomas Anderson‘s “One Battle After Another” has been met with some of the highest acclaim of the year. But the feature — described in Variety‘s review as a “mesmerizing vision of police-state America” — is more than just a crowd and critic pleaser.
According to star Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays a paranoid ex-revolutionary living off the grid, the film reflects the increasingly polarized nature of today’s society.
“It holds a mirror up to society and talks about the divisiveness in our culture and the fact that there’s so much polarity,” he told the BBC, adding that, while he didn’t think “One Battle After Another” has a central message, it features as “interesting undercurrent about extremism” and was “political without making it feel like medicine.”
Also starring Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti, Regina Hall and Teyana Taylor, the film is a black comic satire-meets-action blockbuster. The story is set in a U.S. that’s become a fascist police state where immigrants are rounded up and placed in detention centers and where a group of ragtag guerrillas attempt to disrupt the authoritarian regime.
For DiCaprio, marking his first collaboration with Anderson, it also “finds the humanity in all the central characters,” despite their marked differences. “It’s about the people in the film and the characters — I’m a flawed protagonist — you can relate to them and their struggles and that’s not an easy thing to do.”
Such has been the response, “One Battle After Another” has raced into contention for many as a sure-fire Academy Awards contender, following in the footsteps of Anderson’s previous films “Licorice Pizza,” which was nominated for three Oscars in 2022 and “Phantom Thread,” which landed six nominations in 2018, winning for best costume design.
Of his director, DiCaprio said Anderson had “done a lot of films but in this one, he really went for it.”
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