DiCaprio Re: OBAA - "A Movie That Doesn't Necessarily Have Meaning But is Thought-Provoking" [View all]

Perhaps it is a common phase in the life of successful artists -- the phase where you re-embrace freedom while you troll and tease your critics. Mark Twain famously quipped, "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

PTA said that "One Battle After Another" came from his wanting "to shoot car chases in the desert." He got a huge budget, DiCaprio, del Toro, got 35mm Vistavision -- it's bucketlist stuff. The film is dedicated to Adam Somner, the most popular AD in the business who died last year at age 57. So PTA is taking a freebie and having some fun because life is too danged short to do otherwise.

I think this is PTA's version of the White Album. Bear with me a bit...When the Beatles released "I am the Walrus" they laughed as critics over analyzed it. Anderson loaded OBAA with political stereotypes yet consciously avoids and undercuts any kind of message. Every character is deeply flawed. The "good guys" are amoral bumblers who get each other killed. The bad guys are no better and they kill each other too. Penn is a white supreme with jungle fever. Teyana Taylor plays a militant feminist who doesn't want to be a mother but uses neither birth control nor pregnancy termination. They are self-contradicting characters by design. She has the baby so that PTA can have have 2 hours of chase scenes.

So the political pretext is just plot device and fodder for chase scenes and audience controversy, just a way to sell tickets. What PTA wanted was to have some fun -- car chases, explosions, stunts, dark humor, actors set free to go as big as they wanted. I kind of think he had even more in mind and just ran out of time or money -- he had 20 nuns with machine guns that he didn't use and he had del Toro’s karate students. That was fodder for two more big fight scenes that somehow didn't happen. With the nuns there is no battle; they just cut to them in zip ties.

The only character we sympathize with is the daughter and she has no politics. She flees her bumbling parents at the end to "go to a protest" thousands of miles away but she has never mentioned politics in the whole film and does not specify what the protest is about, eg the possibility that she is just telling her parents what they want to hear so that she can get the hell away from them is left open.

For me confirmation that the mishmash of politics in the film are intentionally pointless is in the Leo and PTA interviews, in the absurd tone of the film and, most overtly, in the title. The cover of the White Album says nothing. The title of this movie says in effect 'There is no message and no integrity in this film' there is only "One Battle After Another"