Early on, there are slow-moving but tense confrontations between Dodd and Freddie in which Hoffman and Phoenix appear to be competing over who can hold the camera longest before delivering a line. The two men need and necessarily hate each other. Anderson juices their struggle, but, oddly, he doesn’t resolve it. He has told interviewers that a character can grow and change, and in “The Master” he allows Freddie to take over the movie. Dodd and his menacing crew may hope to train him, but the point, we realize after a while, is that Freddie Quell can’t be quelled. He’s miserable and free, beyond the cult’s “help.” He wanders, and “The Master” wanders with him—out to sea, into the desert, around rooms. Anderson seems unwilling to wrap things up, and the picture ends tentatively, in melancholy mystery. The title, it turns out, is misleading. Freddie has no master. In the case of Plainview and Freddie Quell, loneliness may be incurable.
Four Valley films, joyous and grim; a birth-of-a-nation industrial masterpiece; meditations on narcissism and control. Anderson’s visions of lonely Americans have mostly been serious movies budgeted in the twenty-to-forty-million-dollar mid-range, some profitable, some not. Warner Bros., to its credit, ignored the hard mockery of industry skeptics who called Anderson a “cult director,” and budgeted “One Battle After Another” at a hundred and thirty million dollars. (The final number was higher.) Anderson responded by summoning all his filmmaking prowess to deliver speed, impact, and violent beauty. The camera, for instance, stays with groups of people moving rapidly, so that we feel close to them as they move, and their movements become weighted, consequential. Even material that is borderline crazy is staged with such conviction and humor that, in the end, you marvel at your disbelief. If you feel left behind at times, bafflement is part of the movie’s power; catching up is part of its pleasure.
In the tumultuous early section, for instance, we see no more than fragments of a brief affair that the revolutionary Perfidia has with Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the military leader of the anti-immigrant goons. Lockjaw is a clear descendant of Sterling Hayden’s mad general in “Dr. Strangelove,” but as Penn creates him—muscled arms bulging like veined sides of beef, his twitchy voice reaching beneath the bottom octave—he’s enjoyably repulsive, a daft, macho gooney bird, just this side of cartoon. Anderson takes him where Kubrick could not take Hayden. The wall-slamming sex that Lockjaw has with Perfidia is a hate fuck, if there ever was one, perhaps the first in big-studio moviemaking. What’s it doing there?
In his 2014 adaptation of “Inherent Vice,” a Thomas Pynchon novel that had come out five years earlier, Anderson bollixed himself trying to recapture the author’s jaunty hipster-noir tone. The result was a disjointed mess—whimsical, arbitrary, almost unwatchable. Undiscouraged, he struggled to adapt an earlier Pynchon book, “Vineland” (1990). In the end, “One Battle After Another” deep-sixes Pynchon’s delirious paranoia while retaining the emotional core of the novel, in which the past, as in a Victorian fiction, charges into the present and reshapes it. The revolution is dead, but an extraordinary sixteen-year-old girl, Willa (Chase Infiniti), who has both the ferocity of her mother, Perfidia, and an enchanting smile, lives in its debris with one of Anderson’s most pathetic losers—the former revolutionary Bob (DiCaprio, in a ratty bun), broken down and exhausted, sipping cheap wine in a bathrobe and going from one toke to the next. The setup may be simple, but the emotional power that it unleashes is enveloping, at times close to anguish. If Bob cares only for the daughter he thinks is his, Lockjaw, who wants to be admitted to some sort of élite white-purity Christian society, cares only to eliminate the biracial girl who threatens his acceptance. It’s a commercial premise: the slob in a red plaid bathrobe fights a one-man army. Anderson, it turns out, is good at box-office.