“The Revolution,” Gil Scott-Heron taught us, “will not be televised.”
But it might turn up on the big screen. And not just in the end game of “Civil War.” “One Battle After Another” is a reminder that the struggle never ends and the revolt against the forces of oppression is ongoing. And it’s not just Chairman Mao who preached that. He was quoting Thomas Jefferson, who taught that a “little rebellion now and then” is how you preserve your liberty.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s new thriller is practically a call to action, the closest we’ll ever come to “The Anarchist Cookbook” adapted to the screen. “Inspired by” Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” tale of aged radicals confronting the racist repression and “greed is good” power grab of the Reagan years, “Battle” is is by turns serio-comic and chilling to the point of depressing.
A country rapidly devolving into a militarized police state, the rule of law and due process going out the door and sinister oligarchs pushing and implementing a white nationalism agenda through violence and staged provocations, this movie is why a lot of us can’t stomach the no-longer-trustworthy evening news. So we go to the cinema/
Leonardo di Caprio plays The Rocket Man, Ghetto Pat, a member of a militant revolutionary group that ironically named itself after a piece of French artillery, The French 75, which was famous before the cocktail that took that name.
Pat is a bomb builder, a fireworks “distraction” provider for his cell, a young man in love with the profane, reckless and outspoken Perfidia (Teyana Taylor of the “White Men Can’t Jump” remake and “Coming 2 America” sequel). She is a sexy Rhianna radical, an unmasked fury who shrieks about “a declaration of war” when they release imprisoned immigrants or rob a bank to finance their battle against the fascist powers that be.
When Perfidia sexually humiliates a proto-ICE MKII unit Captain Lockjaw (Sean Penn) as they liberate a detention camp, the seed is planted for a story of revenge that will span a “Les Miserables” lifetime. She winds up pregnant, and captured after the baby’s birth. She killed a bank guard, so she becomes a “rat,” giving up her comrades to her Army interrogator.
And Ghetto Pat? He becomes Bob Ferguson, a single dad raising young Charlene-renamed-Willa (Chase Infiniti) in a fictional “sanctuary city” in California, where the teen tries to live a normal life with a dad determined to stay stoned and as close to off-the-grid as an ex-revolutionary can manage.
She takes karate classes from Sensie Sergio (Benicio del Toro) and lives under the illusion that her mother was a “hero” and her dad is the only person she can trust. Unless she hears this code phrase about ’60s TV shows “Green Acres,” “Beverly Hillbillies” and “Hooterville (sic) Junction.”
Anybody reciting that? “Trust them with your life.”
When Willa’s “extracted” from a high school dance by one of Dad’s old comrades (Regina Hall), all the aged chickens have come home to roost. Col. Lockjaw wants her because there’s something he wants to hide from this Bohemian Grove/White Supremacist “Christmas Adventurers Club” of above-the-law shakers and movers (Tony Goldwyn and Kevin Tighe are among the villains).
And Pat-now-Bob is on the lam, on the run, hoping to elude capture long enough to rescue her. Stoner Bob is about to learn that The Revolution never ended. It just turned Latino. Because Willa’s martial arts sensei (del Toro) is a lot cooler than anybody figured.
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