What is so special about Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie?
“One Battle After Another” opens tonight in previews and tomorrow officially. It has a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes and is destined for lots of awards nominations, especially Oscars.
Tracking puts opening weekend around $25 million. It doesn’t matter, really. “One Battle” is a long term project. It will play to good audiences until early December when those nominations come rolling in.
PTA’s most accessible movie, “One Battle” stars Leonardo Di Caprio, Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio del Toro, and Chase Infiniti, all of whom have been doing Q&A’s all over New York for various guilds and groups.
This past Sunday, the group sat for one at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for press and patrons of the New York Film Festival. When you see the film, keep some of this in mind.
“One Battle” is such a rollicking film — two hours, 40 minutes fly by. “One Battle” never rests. Everyone is in motion all the time, running, jumping, rolling, shooting, crashing cars. It might be the first action comedy with a political message.
Toward the end of the Q&A, Film Society chief Dennis Lim asked actress Regina Hall, who plays Deandra, a key shadowy figure in the film: “I saw an interview you did maybe like a few days ago, where you said that when you read Paul’s scripts he doesn’t really describe those sequences, he just writes, ‘chaos, TBD.’ What’s it like to experience ‘chaos, TBD’?” (Editor’s note: To Be Determined.)
Hall — who’s got a pretty hefty resume under belt including a 2018 Best Actress Award from the New York Film Critics Circle — said: “It’s pretty exciting. It was chaos in perfect art form, but in a way that my imagination didn’t have. But I think that’s what’s amazing about Paul. There’s a film that lives inside of his head, like visually, and it’s pretty spectacular to watch it, you know, become live.”
DiCaprio plays the central character, Bob Ferguson, a kind of everyman who’s the audience’s guide through the chaos. He added: “I would just only add that TBD is a very important thing because the whole film is TBD.”
Two time Oscar winner Sean Penn told me later he had no idea how he came up with the unusual walk that marks his violent, racist, really tragic character, the antagonist — one of Penn’s finest roles. He seems actually shocked this hideous Colonel Lockjaw is being embraced by audiences.
At the Q&A Penn said: “I think that I’ve been more value-added to a project  when I’ve had the experience of kind of early in the reading of the script the first time, sort of hearing the music of a character. And this one, Paul would only know how much I interpreted  and how much he wrote me literally or subliminally to hear the music that way.“
