Here, with OBAA, "inspired" means PTA takes significant liberties with his adaptation. Supposedly, Pynchon's Vineland is a story about counter culture Vietnam-era revolutionaries, activists and layabouts, hippie survivors reflecting back on episodic battles (one battle after another) with police state goons, redneck state troopers, FBI spooks, and other menacing agents of The Man in the turbulent 1960s and '70s. PTA fast-forwards to the 21st century, relocates the locus of conflict from the Vietnam war and its aftermath to southern border culture wars and conflicts over immigration.
But the bitter binary, right vs left cold war conflict, is more or less the same. The redneck police state goons are now soldiers in fatigues, domestic war on drugs or war on terror commando units; lead by Sean Penn, one Steven J. Lockjaw, a demented Oliver North with more neurotic tics than Dennis Hopper, recruited and managed by a secret white supremacist group known as the Christmas Adventurers Club. The lefties, antifa, multicultural members of a radical collective known as the French 75, led by Teyana Taylor, aka Perfidia Beverly Hills, and Leonardo DiCaprio, aka Ghetto Bob Calhoun (sometimes called Rocketman), attempt to liberate poor immigrants incarcerated in cages and generally disrupt the police-state crackdown on migration and cultural mixing.
One key to unlocking the film's narrative force is first recognizing it isn't social realism. There is no bomb-throwing leftist terrorist group like the French 75 operating around the southern border of the US or I'm assuming there isn't. If there were I'm fairly certain Fox would be hyping their violent exploits as the perfect cassus belli for the "emergency" powers Trump wants to unleash against domestic opposition; even worse and with more impunity than he already has. Not that the lack of organized leftist violence, antifa, has stopped him from trying but the French 75 appears to be as much a paranoid fantasy of the right as the Christmas Adventurers Club is a paranoid fantasy of the left. Two paranoid fantasies locked in internecine conflict, no end in sight, one battle after another.
The allegory is ingeniously illustrated by both sides operating as fronts for Kafkaesque catacombs, escape tunnel networks, and vast conspiratorial bunker hideouts. When a member of the Christmas Adventures enters an otherwise nondescript McMansion in a gated-community for a secret meeting he is led downstairs into a labyrinth of underground corridors and closed doors, as if entering a vast secret operation of the Pentagon or NSA. Likewise, when Rocketman follows Benicio del Toro, Sergio St. Carlos, into a humble corner market in a Latino neighborhood, following him upstairs (downstairs/upstairs), he enters a hallucinatory large complex of safe spaces, hallways, small rooms, full of women and children, hiding out from the dreaded authorities; a sanctuary. In each case, the building facades are mere doorways into vast conspiratorial networks. Like the court building in Kafka's The Trial (1915).
Choosing legend over history, in the old John Ford formulation, isn't at work here as much as turning history into legend, allegory, and then interrogating and satirizing the battlefield of human relationships and destruction that results. This approach naturally can generate continuity problems.
Paternity questions are central to the story. Perfidia has some intense sexual thing with the French 75's commando actions and blowing stuff up; this is why she couples with Rocketman in the first place, she likes his way with explosives. So Perfidia's encounter with Lockjaw is fascinatingly illicit, attention grabbing, maybe like the raining frogs scene in Magnolia, both stunning and a little goofy, potentially traumatizing, but inscrutable. I wasn't sure what happened between Perfidia and Lockjaw until the end of the long movie and even then always felt like something didn't feel quite right about that earlier scene. It felt too glib and needed more something, imho.
Moreover, if PTA were to take editing advice from me, he doesn't and will never of course, I'd also suggest cutting the last Lockjaw scene. I see how it underscores the comforting point that the racist reactionaries are preoccupied most with killing each other in an endless effort to "clean" their ranks of race and cultural mixing but still the scene feels gratuitous. We already got that. The scene with the central committee of the Christmas Adventurers, deep in the underground bunker, with exquisitely savage black humor, makes clear they are some super segregationist white supremacy society obsessed with not allowing any contaminating non-white Christian elements into their secret society and doing everything they can with money and force to keep people from other non-white societies in minimum wage slavery conditions. The ending shot with Lockjaw in the incinerator framed by the port hole window is ghastly cinematic, unforgettable in its way, but maybe a little much; Frankenstein burning in a fire surrounded by the village mob? Again, we got that in CA's car chase assassination. The last Lockjaw scene is gratuitous and unnecessary to the story.
Nevertheless, overall I thought the movie rocked and the extra stuff adds to its shaggy dog story-ness. Maybe the shaggy dog aspects are why or how One Battle gets away with so savagely satirizing current events, polarizing left-right police-state conflicts in the US at the southern border and about the southern border, without sounding anything like a partisan official on cable news or a troll on social media.
Loved del Toro's zen martial arts teacher; his Spanish-speaking ghetto captain blues riff of a role. And this is maybe my favorite DiCaprio, admittedly not a particularly high bar for me, certainly his most sympathetic character. He's like Lebowski as a burnt-out leftist revolutionary. Tayana Taylor's Perfidia Beverly Hills is an exploding rocket of Black power and sexuality, finally captured and shattered shooting a Black security guard, she ends up ratting out her friends and disappears, reduced to a story plot foil. I wanted more of her story and thought her performance should have earned her more.
But, ultimately, I share One Battle's sympathies: Mixed-race daughter of racist conflict survives and inherits her parents left-sympathizing rebellious instincts.
My favorite part of the movie is when the daughter faced with these questions about her own paternity chooses the father who was there for her over blood or wealth or whatever. It resembles the story in George Eliot's Silas Marner, which I recently read. Choosing Marner's parental love over blood wealth and status. I also got the feeling there could have been other classic literary allusions in One Battle I wasn't picking up on. At any rate, it's funny that Ghetto Bob like Silas Marner turned out to be a pretty good dad, if still a chronically stoned paranoid fool. The funniest ongoing gag of the movie is how aging drug-addled Rocketman can't remember the code words that will give him access to the French 75 network so he can save his daughter. When Willa finally barks code words at him on the road in a big secret handshake moment Bob can't say back to her the words she wants and expects. He's just another inadequate dad unable to be there for her when she needs him. But still he's the dad she knows and loves best and was in fact always the one that was there for her. She rushes towards him, abandoning the secret code rules and embraces him. Ghetto Bob is the counter-culture's Homer Simpson. And all this melodrama with none of the self-satisfying smarminess I find in most of DiCaprio's roles. Mostly, he's bewildered and hassled and trying to be there for Willa like most any other devoted parent.
What about Chase Infinity, who plays Willa, the prodigal daughter? She conveys her woke school of rock girl power perfectly. As symbolic figure she's all charm. But she doesn't say a lot. She comes off like a shy teenager, a good kid, but there is not much more to go on. That she doesn't say a lot adds in its way to the symbolic power of her role, mixed-race multicultural pride, but not to any more complex understanding of her as an actress, not that I'm any expert on acting anyway.
At any rate, times tough. Chalk this one up for the resistance. Stay strong. Peace.
Extra notes:
To me the French 75 still look like a Vietnam era leftist revolutionary action group, SLA, RAF (Baader-Meinhof), like that, more than any more contemporary leftist group? I just saw the current regime targeting some self-identifying antifa or anti-fascist groups in Europe, the US gov now formally identifying them as terrorist organizations. Overlooking the galling mendacity for a moment, fascist government condemning anti-fascists, are there really any leftist revolutionary groups committing acts of mass violence and sabotage like the French 75 around today? I remember Earth First! actions in the 1980s and 1990s. They destroyed machinery, very Luddite of them, but I don't remember them killing anybody?
And what about historical models for the Christmas Adventurers Club? The first image that came to mind for me was the secretive Christian political organization known as The Family in Jeff Sharlet's 2008 book. Or Federalist Society heads meeting eminences from the donor class, like that picture of justice Thomas sitting with some rich guys on a palatial backyard patio? Halliburton and Blackwater CEOs and their best veteran military officer friends (identifiable by their untreated PTSD tweaking) in an underground state-of-the-art military bunker like Dr. Strangelove? The rich central committee backers of the KKK and other racist extremist groups? There is no shortage of potential historical analogues.
At any rate, for my money, the French 75 strike me as the more fabricated, the bigger stretch, more historically out of place, than the Christmas Adventurers Club, but I'm a liberal leftist lunatic simp, so you'll have to take this all with a grain of salt.
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