OPINION: Someone to keep the battle going

“One Battle After Another,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s newest film budgeted at about a bizarrely large $150 million, starts with the United States in a modern revolution. Detained immigrants await their dehumanizing removal from a country once thought to be open to the free.

But, in the dead of night, they’re saved by a far-left group calling themselves the French 75. They’re loud, bombastic, maybe even a little crazy. But their mission is bigger than themselves. Quite simply, no one should pick and choose who deserves the right to be an American.

Several fireworks, guns, bombs and car chases later, the French 75 has failed. Skip 16 years later, and the world hasn’t changed.

Bob Ferguson, formerly “Ghetto” Pat of the French 75 and played by Leonardo DiCaprio, has spent those years smoking himself into oblivion. It seems to be the only way he can view the world after the paranoia of failure led him to the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross.

There’s only one person that pulls him from his own hermitry: his daughter Willa, played by newcomer Chase Infiniti. Even while faded in a conference with her high school history teacher, Bob almost breaks into tears when he hears his daughter is a good student.

Within Anderson’s deeply layered movie — the first movie of the year I’d say is perfect — Bob’s world is at siege once again. Willa has been taken by the French 75’s haunting nemesis Colonel Lockjaw. Bob, who has been fearing his past’s return, now has to face it once again.

This is just within one face of the movie. With a brilliant understanding that supporting characters can be just as interesting and thematically relevant as the DiCaprio lead, “One Battle After Another” never complicates itself with melodrama or dumbs itself down with satire.

Lockjaw, played by Sean Penn in a best-ever performance, gets as much background building his white supremacist, sexually frustrated and narrowing view of the world as Bob’s status as a weed-smoking girldad.

What this allows for is a true villain which in today’s movie world feels like a throwback. Yet, “One Battle After Another” is present in the now. The anxieties of those who are unable to live their lives in safety are explored with such precision you’d be forgiven if you thought the movie was written yesterday.

Yet, the world of undocumented immigrants in Baktan Cross, led by a notably culture-clashing Mexican karate instructor Sensei Sergio, is oddly calm. Even when the loosely justified military incursion into the city lands with riots in the streets, it all feels oddly familiar, even routine, as if this was all inevitable.

Sergio, played in a wonderfully joyous performance by Benicio del Toro, says his people have been under siege for hundreds of years. A mantra of “ocean waves” guides him, ever-calm in a world that never seems to accept him or the people around him.

As Bob turns to Sergio for guidance after Willa is kidnapped, Sergio has to fight his own revolution to protect the undocumented community of Baktan Cross. It can be oddly peripheral at times, such as when Sergio guides Bob through an apartment where families of immigrants gather.

These moments, watching the edges of Baktan Cross live their normal life and be so close to it all being uprooted, is grounded in empathy. It’s one of the many underlined dichotomies between the two sides of battle.

Both Bob and Lockjaw are fathers in their own way, but their differences are defining. Lockjaw’s obsession with a higher power, the feeling to be superior to the people he subjugates, contrasts with Bob’s personal emptiness but selfless desire to see his daughter succeed.

It rears into a performance from DiCaprio which finally tears him away from the luxury and cleanliness of his past roles. Bob is a messy, sweaty man in a bathrobe and beanie buffooning his way through Baktan Cross. Yet, Bob’s higher power comes from someone smaller and more precious.

Willa, 16, is the one thing which draws Bob back to reality. Bob will put her friends in a headlock if it meant they never lay a hand on her. With Willa’s mother, another member of the French 75, having left the family 16 years ago, Bob has no one else.

Yet, Bob still grieves for what he can’t teach. He cries to Sergio about how he can’t do her hair like maybe her mother could. He berates the history teacher to make sure his daughter learns of successful revolutions and the problems still in the world. He even bans Willa from having a cell phone.

But, Willa, who is ever close to adulthood, got a phone without ever telling Bob. In fact, Willa has been growing up while outside the range of Bob. As Bob comes to terms with his past and paranoia, he realizes something profound.

Bob is a failure. The battles he fought all those years ago didn’t change the world. He comes face to face with that reminder throughout the movie. But, even if he failed, there’s someone who can keep the battle going.

There’s someone who is defiant, angry and will support the people who can’t fight for themselves. At times, she looks just like her mother. Even after his own failure, if there’s anyone who can succeed, it could be her.