Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another" - A Teaser for a Trailer Writeup
A few minutes ago, Warner Bros. dropped the first teaser for Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, currently dated for late September.
It's not much to go on. But if there's one thing I'm good at, it's thinking too hard about any scrap we can get of Paul's footage. So why not give these 21 seconds a good look? We'll go deeper into what all this means next week when the full trailer drops.
First off, we have Mr. Leonard DiCaprio, the man who was almost Dirk Diggler. This collaboration has been a long time coming, and while Leo has acquired a bit of baggage (deserved or not) for being an awards-hungry try-hard who doesn't know women over 25 exist, he's...also sort of indisputably one of the giants of his generation? So I'm pretty excited to see what Paul is able to draw out of him. From Burt Reynolds to Adam Sandler to Lesley Manville and beyond, he tends to draw out the best in the people he works with.
There's also the fact that this is a gun-shootin action picture (is this PTA's Red State? Too early to say), and Paul's most expensive to date. It looks like that expense is going towards action of a fairly bleak type. I tend to see each of Paul's movies as a response to the one that came before, so after the warmth and bliss of Licorice Pizza, here we have something similarly sun-drenched but now sun-scorched. This doesn't look anything like the celebration of love and liberation that his last movie was. I love it.
Now, we have to ask: is it Vineland? Sources certainly indicate that it probably is a loose adaptation of the Thomas Pynchon novel. It's been a while since I read that one (though I'm planning a re-read this summer, presuming this whole "It's Vineland" thing isn't upended in the meantime), so I can't say much except "Sure, Leo looks like he could be a Zoyd-type figure, why not." I'm not going to comb through the Wikipedia summary right now to look for signifiers I can map on, but I'll say: that book read to me (years ago) as similar in vibe to Inherent Vice, a bit of a live-action comic strip. If this is the tone, it would have to be a pretty loose adaptation, and I like that, too. What I don't like is the idea of a second PTA Pynchon movie. He's done that! I don't need to see his legacy forever entwined with one writer's; that seems like unnecessary baggage to pack onto your career. So maybe I'm hoping that reread is wasted energy after all. It would be great to see him make something decisively his own.
Finally, and perhaps most conspicuously, this is the first PTA movie to be set in the present day since Punch-Drunk Love over 20 years ago. I made kind of a big deal out of his in my book (Thecinemaofpaulthomasandersonamericanapicryphaavailablewhereveryougetyourbooks), and PTA is definitely one among many current auteurs, from Wes to Quentin, who seem afraid of smartphones. Fair enough, I'd say, but at the same time, Punch-Drunk Love is incredibly smart and precise in how it wields the then-modern world against its characters. Think about the pre-internet phone sex and menacing touch-tone phone calls that haunt Barry; that is such a 2002 movie, and I can't wait to see what such a 2025 movie means for Paul Thomas Anderson.
OK, is that about it? Sounds like a new classic Johnny Greenwood score incoming...and if I'm sure nobody's thrilled to see Sean Penn onscreen we all mostly hand-waved Licorice Pizza so I guess we'll do it again...Leo running in a hoodie has big Ali vibes...OK, I think that'll about do it for a teaser post. Let's meet back up next week and really get our hands messy with the trailer.