Things Are Going to Slide in All Directions

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

* (Has redeeming facet)

THE RUNNING MAN (Edgar Wright, 2025)

** (Worth watching)

If there's one thing I've gained from being contemporary to Paul Thomas Anderson's career, it's an understanding of the reservations Robin Wood ("Smart-Ass and Cutie-Pie: Notes Toward the Evaluation of Altman" in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan) and Jonathan Rosenbaum ("Improvisations and Interactions in Altmanville" from the Spring 1975 issue of Sight & Sound) had about the first filmography I fervently adored as a teenager.

For it's the arrested, ambitious juvenilia in all of Anderson's films, save his lone successful* feature, the strictly juvenile comedy LICORICE PIZZA, that make his films enticing to watch, vaguely compelling to experience, and ultimately unsatisfying.

For more than two decades, I've wavered between considering Anderson overrated or just not-for-me. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, taking (very weak) inspiration from my favorite Thomas Pynchon novel, nudges me again toward the former.

*And even here we're being generous about the late-in-the-picture, Altman-from-NASHVILLE-signifier red herring that makes one appreciate (relatively) the intensely fetishistic film references that make up Tarantino's films (e.g. "This violent four-hour pastiche is about how much he loves his Mom? Huh.").

Though Anderson again comes through as a lightweight, he's an inoffensive one. As befits his leading man, who's been this ineffectual in films by far better directors. (Scorsese...Eastwood...shit, Ridley Scott? No.) Benicio Del Toro, far too modestly applied, transcends the bullshit as he did in the not-entirely-dissimilar SICARIO* and Sean Penn tries his damnedest to do the same but lacks the fastball he had years ago on the set of SHE'S SO LOVELY and only manages to be grotesque.

*Is Taylor Sheridan just Paul Thomas Anderson without good taste? Because, let me be clear, Paul Thomas Anderson's career demonstrates estimable good taste in other people's art.

Yes, it's bullshit. Every aspect of the Christmas Adventurers Club straddles the line of sniggering, bad-boy transgression and satire. The presence of America's funniest Republican, Jim Downey, in all of these scenes gives away the establishment nature of the project. You can try to write clever and chilling dialogue. Failing that, you can bring in Kevin Tighe to put it over and that will work up to a point. But the film is hampered by depicting the primary threat as personal, Penn's Lockjaw, rather than systemic. The power structure, such that it's depicted is either mockingly effete* or an indistinct backdrop for the French 75 to go through their revolutionary motions. The worst guys even eliminate the threat of Lockjaw from Bob and Willa's lives. It's an inadvertent gift of freedom, motivated purely by their sick and nefarious worldview. I think it's meant to be profoundly ironic instead of pessimistically neutering the agency of the revolutionaries.

*James Raterman's interrogator Danvers is the exception. His every experience lights a spark of deep-seated fear of what a competent, relentless, destructive force will do to impose its will on the people.

Don't hold Anderson to any of this. If he really meant it, there'd be a coda like the one that ruins THERE WILL BE BLOOD by reiterating (LOUDLY) what the film you just watched was all about. ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER isn't about much. The disingenuousness may not be conscious. I suspect Anderson genuinely intended to have central female characters in his film. He just failed when given the opportunity to focus the bulk of his film on two shallow male characters.

Edgar Wright's wildly uneven remake of THE RUNNING MAN doesn't fall short of its ambitions, with regard to female characters* or otherwise, mostly by virtue of having very modest ambitions to begin with. Which puts it on the termite art side of this diptych. The shallowness of its two male leads is ameliorated by a less complex and more clear good vs. evil dialectic. Wright (and his contractually twice-billed co-writer Michael Bacall) dispenses of the loves (wife and daughter) of hero Glen Powell's life early and (maybe) permanently to focus on his righteous rage over the holistic inequality of the films' near-future society.

*The insertion of Emilia Jones' poorly conceived and worse-written Amelia in the final act almost derails the film entirely. It does the filmmakers no credit to contrast her with Powell's sidekicks of the first- and second-acts, Daniel Ezra and Michael Cera. Cera's performance is the best thing in the film and a worthy successor to Tim Robbins' impactful turn in Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS.

Your mileage may vary, but empathy for Powell's inchoate rage in search of the least bad solution comes more easily and provides a more powerful climactic fatherly catharsis for me than indulgence in DiCaprio's bumbling burnout. Similarly, to the extent THE RUNNING MAN has something to say, it's simpler but more powerful. In Wright's film, the oppression is resolutely systemic, the soldiers disposable tools of the powerful elite, and change is more possible when the proletariat can suffer no more exploitation at the hands of those who make, with no intention of following them themselves, the rules.

A better film* might find a way to avoid the glib dismissals of the visionary, truth-telling, revolutionaries Ezra and Cera play, but the idea of the difficulty of disseminating truth in a landscape of disinformation has more to say about our current moment than the hand-me-down revolutionary language from Pynchon's generation that stands in for a revolutionary vision from either Anderson's characters or the film itself.

*Brian De Palma's THE RUNNING MAN? That version might never end, given the opportunities to use multiple screens in this near-future.

The self-involvement on Anderson's central revolutionary isn't really interrogated (Despite the recurring presence of competent people of color getting things done for and around Bob -- I get it, but why not make the move about them instead?) whereas Powell gets a modest hero's journey from self-aware self-motivation to an understanding where his personal freedom can intersect with a broader movement of empowerment. This is not an especially profound point (nor is it the central point of the film -- well-made action set pieces are the point of the film) but it's an effective one within the context of the film's ambitions. Far more effective than the gap between the grand ambition and spare ideas of Anderson's white elephant.

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Film Is a Battleground #14 (Ray, Sideways, Shaun of the Dead)

RAY (on DVD)
SIDEWAYS (in theaters)
SHAUN OF THE DEAD (on DVD)

RAY (Taylor Hackford, 2004)
** (Worth seeing)

RAY is eminently watchable because it contains art but there’s little chance the film itself will be mistaken for art itself. Armond White accurately described the film as “conscientious but unimaginative.” Unlike Michael Mann (ALI) and Julie Taymor (FRIDA), Taylor Hackford makes no attempt to break free of the biopic’s constrictions. Neither Mann nor Taymor succeeded in dramatizing their admiration for their subjects. Both of those films exhibited far greater technical skill than does RAY, but RAY benefits from its modest ambitions. Too much of ALI and FRIDA seemed self-deluding; the filmmakers used their technical gifts relentlessly condescending to the genre and failing mask their lack of insight on their subjects.

Both ALI and FRIDA were long films and felt like it. Despite Hackford and screenwriter James L. White’s competent, pedestrian work and RAY’s prodigious running time one regrets the film’s abrupt ending which forgoes the second half of Charles’ life. All the film has going for it is Charles’ still-fascinating genius. As with Hank Williams or Bill Monroe, it’s amazing to consider that a man created a body of work so artistically innovative and universally popular that the culture completely assimilates them within a generation or two. In choosing to end the film at the point Charles vows to give up heroin, Hackford invites the cheap inference that the drug fueled the genius.

This choice undermines Jamie Foxx who has been quite rightly praised for rejecting the opportunity to make Charles a lovable character and embracing the man’s complexity. His anger and passion made him both a junkie and an R&B Caravaggio. Caravaggio found room in his religious commissions to depict the carnal, criminal life he lived. Charles used the passionate frenzy of gospel music to express similarly worldly desires. Somehow neither Caravaggio’s homosexuality nor Charles’ race and his blindness which their respective world’s treated as alienating weaknesses limited the scope of their artistic visions. Perhaps being put at arm’s length by the world gave them the perspective to conflate their realism about humanity with wonder of the transformative power of God’s grace.

Hackford deserves credit for surrounding the gifted Foxx with an impressive supporting cast. The film is filled with generally underemployed actors (Kerry Washington, Regina King, Terrence Howard, Curtis Armstrong, Richard Schiff, Clifton Powell, Bokeem Woodbine, David Krumholtz, and Wendell Pierce). Many of them are overqualified for their roles here as well, but Hackford clearly appreciates and makes use of their talents.

SIDEWAYS (Alexander Payne, 2004)
* (Has redeeming facet)

Like Matthew Broderick, Paul Giamatti is both an unassuming and an inventive actor. So, as Broderick did Alexander Payne’s similarly overpraised ELECTION, Giamatti brings an admirable dignity to an underwritten character that Payne thinks is a loser. Payne’s reticence has thus far prevented from developing any sort of style as a writer or filmmaker. Some have called this perceptively observational and evenhanded honesty. I just don’t think he has anything to say. This is, after all, the man who discovered Chris Klein and took offense to being compared to Preston Sturges upon the release of the worthless CITIZEN RUTH.

Still, Payne attracts good actors, and for a scene as good as the one in SIDEWAYS where Giamatti must make polite conversation with his ex-wife, I guess the whole enterprise (a dull, pretentiously middlebrow CALIFORNIA SPLIT) is somewhat worthwhile.

SHAUN OF THE DEAD (Edgar Wright, 2004)
** (Worth seeing)

A film of small, unassuming (not to be mistaken for slight) virtues that works better as social satire than horror film. The first half hour a minor classic, the film loses its way when rote zombie fighting dominates proceedings but recovers for a redemptive coda that simultaneously celebrates the human capacity for adaptability and satirizes the ambitionless manner we generally utilize that capacity.

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