Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson works with the biggest budget of his career on his first contemporary piece in two decades.
BOOM BOOM RUNNING DOGS – It’s the French 75! Rocketman (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) are the revolution. Blowing up buildings, robbing banks, kidnapping soldiers, and liberating prisoners. Viva la revolucion! Until things fall apart for the likes of Regina Hall and Alana Haim as their group fractures under the hammer blows of Captain Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Sixteen years later, Rocketman is now known as Bob Ferguson, raising his daughter Charlene, now known as Willa (Chase Infiniti), by himself, and keeping a low, permanently addled profile. But when Lockjaw gets the tap on the shoulder to join the Christmas Adventurers Club, he needs to clean house, and that includes a possibly Willa shaped skeleton in his closet. Can the remnants of the French 75 outwit a man with the resources of the federal government? Can Bob sober up and fight again?
PTA is a curious phenomenon. He is hugely praised, but for what exactly? Joss Whedon talked of shooting Buffy episode ‘The Body’ in the PTA style; the camera pointlessly following characters around in long takes of walking. The most memorable moments of his two Day-Lewis collaborations are outlandish comedy; but they are meant to be towering dramas. What exactly is the gestalt of PTA? There are absurdist moments dotted throughout this movie, some of them highly amusing. But to talk about nail-biting action sequences is off the mark. The car chase over the craziest highway in America is visually unusual but only comes to a climax after you’ve already begun to wonder how long he’s going to keep this repetition up. This movie does not feel its great length, because of the momentum of its very simple plot. But other directors would’ve brought that driving plot in twenty minutes shorter.
Opening a movie with twenty odd minutes of truly insufferable characters and sexual humiliation, with the implicit threat of castration, is a genuinely baffling decision. And as left wing violence in America demonstrably spikes, that choice of editorial focus, released days after an attack on an ICE facility, looks like pouring oil on a fire. This has little to do with the Vineland of Thomas Pynchon, unless one considers it Pynchon to effectively drop Leo as The Dude, sorry, I meant Bob, into a riff on Terminator 2. Penn has the most comically ungainly gait as the hard-charging shoot first and also shoot later white supremacist Lockjaw who is hunting Willa. DiCaprio has considerable charm as a paranoid stoner trying to recapture his revolutionary zeal to reach her first. Benicio Del Toro has a glorious controlled cameo as the small town sensei helping him. They set a bar others fail to reach.
PTA composes some beautiful shots, and some wonderful moments, but there’s an odd deja vu of Eddington to this – and from casting to tonal choices arguably Ari Aster did it all better.
2.75/5
Talking Movies 