#leonardodicaprio – Mouth of the River

If you’ve been to any of the No Kings or Hands Off rallies this year and heard any of us Boomers say we “can’t believe we’re still doing this,” the title of this film is for you.

As is the film. Though the promos offer scenes from an action-packed thriller, One Battle After Another is impossible to categorize–which makes it worth all of its two-and-a-half-plus hours.

My endorsement comes right away because the opening scenes had me wondering if I should sit so long through something that seemed so outdated and misleading. A subtitle at the start telling us that we are 17 years in the past would have helped. Instead, we get one identifying an immigration detention center, which reinforces the misconception of being in the present. In retrospect, that may have been intentional.

Despite that, the clashing political and sexual intrigue in every breath of revolutionary Perfidia (Tenyana Taylor) kept me in the thrall of what-happens-next. About then, we get the subtitle, “17 years later,” and it all falls into place–especially for those of us who placed ourselves at Anti-War and Civil Rights rallies 50 and 60 years ago, only to reprise our roles in 2025.

Falls into place not just as a story of its own, but as the latest bid for inclusion into the catalog of films that capture a national era. With police raids of a workplace and a school looking so much like the ICE raids described daily on TV and radio, One Battle‘s place should be as secure. Yes, we are inescapably in the present.

For comparison to others fitting that description, One Battle is as incisive as Wall Street (1987) and at times as zany as Network (1976). Sean Penn’s Col. Stephen Lockjaw, as weird as his name, loudly echos Dr. Strangelove. Characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Benicio del Toro could have been drawn out of an early Woody Allen movie; their scenes together more like the stylized sight-gags of director Wes Anderson than of Director Paul Thomas Anderson who is best known for Boogie Nights (1997) and the film that One Battle most closely resembles, There Will Be Blood (2007).

The women are more seriously drawn, even if one has a name that, like “Perfidia” and “Lockjaw,” sounds like it’s from an R-rated version of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Deandra (Regina Hall) does all she can to protect the young while devoted to the revolution. And it is her charge, Willa (Chastity Infiniti), conceived and born in those explosive first twelve minutes, who emerges as the film’s center and soul until she answers the call of a ham radio and drives off to Oakland for yet another dubious battle.

While car chase scenes fill movies I tend to avoid, Anderson puts brakes on one that screams up and down rolling hills with cameras that put us in the car. But there are no brakes in the father-daughter relationship. This is DiCaprio at his best–as pliable as he was in Don’t Look Up and yet as scheming as in Flowers of the Flower Moon–in scenes with Infiniti whose performance may well earn her an Oscar nomination.

For that, you can add “Character Study” to “Action Epic,” “Political Thriller,” and “Dark Comedy” as yet another tag. But if I had to settle on just one category, I’d propose a new one:

One Battle After Another is a national portrait.

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https://rpp.pe/cine/internacional/leonardo-dicaprio-regresa-a-los-cines-este-2025-con-one-battle-after-another-de-paul-thomas-anderson-noticia-1623273
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30144839/

As the credits rolled after Killers of a Flower Moon, I offered a comparison to one Screening Room patron as she left:

“We just saw The Godfather set in 1920s Oklahoma.”

She looked up quizzically and thought for a moment before saying, “Yes, I can see that.”

Not sure just what she saw, but I saw Robert De Niro in the Brando role, and Leonardo DiCaprio in the Pacino role–although there’s an interrogation scene late in the film with lighting that makes DiCaprio look like Brando, and his mumbling at times needed subtitles.

Admittedly, my analogy does not go much further than that, as Italians were easily more established in New York by the mid-20th Century than any Native Americans anywhere are to this day. The Osage were one of several tribes forced out of southern states into Oklahoma territory.

Director Martin Scorsese covers that (relatively) known history with archival footage, adding details that may come as a surprise. Whites created Oklahoma because the land seemed worthless, but the Osage struck oil and became the richest, per capita, people on earth.

Only a matter of time before the whites figured out how to undo that, all of this just down the road from Tulsa where, at the same time, a thriving neighborhood dubbed “Black Wall Street” was wiped out by white gangs aided and abetted by law enforcement.

All this is background in a film that keeps sharp focus on the ill-conceived marriage of a white man (DiCaprio) and a red woman (Lily Gladstone, a revelation). Her family is murdered one by one. His is ruled by a land-grabbing patriarch posing as a philanthropist dressed in religion while ordering murders as if he was ordering burgers and fries.

All of it is true, based on a book of the same title that will never be assigned in Florida schools or made available on the shelves of its school libraries. Ditto communities in Massachusetts if book-banning groups–with Orwellian names such as “Citizens for Responsible Education” that fool well-intentioned but gullible parents–get their way.

I may not know exactly what that woman saw or how much of my analogy she’d accept, but I’m sure that the historical revelations–in the face of so many attempts to whitewash American history today–are why she called the film one that every American should see.

One more analogy:

At the close of Killers of a Flower Moon, we look straight down at the top of a drum as several drummers keep the beat for a powwow. Camera rises slowly, and we gradually see more and more dancers circling around it in an open field.

We hear that the sense of smell offers the strongest memories, but the sound of a drum at a powwow puts me right back into the summer of 1977 when I first walked into a powwow on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

Over fifty feet away from the drum, I stopped in my tracks and stood perfectly still. I could feel the vibration in my bones. This was new.

By that time I had been to many rock-and-roll concerts, all of them far louder. At times I’d put my hands to my ears to prevent so much sound from coming in. At the powwow the sound was already in, head to toe. This was frightening.

But only for the moment. Once I understood it–there is a reason that the musical term “clavical” is the medical term for collar bone–it was exhilarating, and I’ve decibed it in conversation all these years.

There’s much about Killers of the Flower Moon, even in the promos, that may frighten or intimidate a would-be viewer: the possibility of it turning into a lecture (it never does), of it being violent (at times it is), of it being over three hours (and no intermission).

Again, only for the moment. There are reasons why the comment most frequently heard in the lobby when the film ends goes something like: “That didn’t seem long at all.”

Those reasons are captured in this review:

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/killers-of-the-flower-moon-movie-review-2023

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At the Newburyport Screening Room through November 2. Check for times:

https://www.newburyportmovies.com/