The Real Battle of “One Battle After Another”

 

 

"Were the subject banal or frivolous, the approach would offer no more than one caper after another. But this is a story of high political stakes. Set in an alternate version of the United States, it involves leftist revolutionaries, the government’s largely successful efforts to take them down, and the long aftermath—both intimate and societal—of the rebellion. At times, Anderson trivializes the righteous ardor that goes into active, violent resistance, but there is nothing trivial in his portrait of shattered lives and relationships and of an American society shaken to its core. Furthermore, in dramatizing the mighty lurches of his imagined history, including of its alternative present day, he looks profoundly beyond the immediate terms of his fiction to reach powerful insights regarding the horrors of the moment. The film depicts the radical derangements of power, and the kinds of enlightenment that may hold out hope (however sentimental that notion may be), even if somewhere in the distance."

read review by RICHARD BRODY