"It is not his first foray into Pynchon-the writer-director's Inherent Vice (2014) was a literal restaging of the author's beach-noir detective yarn-but this new one feels, somehow, even truer to the novelist's spirit. From Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland, Anderson borrows a basic conceit: A group of countercultural misfits, living underground, whose lives-on-the-fringe are disturbed by the return, years later, by a government tormentor operating as a stand-in for that all-American avatar of authority and oppression typically called "The Man.""
"When one job goes south, the French 75's de facto leader, Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor), betrays her comrades, and shacks up with the grimacing anti-immigration military strongman Stephen J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). Racked by guilt, she squirrels out of Witness Protection and absconds to Mexico, leaving him to sneer over a particularly evocative "Dear John" letter. With the French 75 dismantled (and many members summarily executed), Perfidia's former main squeeze (DiCaprio) takes their daughter-who may in fact be Lockjaw's daughter-and decamps underground,"
Paul Thomas Anderson adapts Thomas Pynchon's Vineland into One Battle After Another, transplanting its countercultural-versus-authority conceit to the present. An activist group called the French 75 frees immigrant holding camps, bombs government buildings, and intimidates anti-abortion politicians. After a botched operation, leader Perfidia Beverley Hills betrays her comrades and allies with anti-immigration strongman Stephen J. Lockjaw. Perfidia flees Witness Protection to Mexico, leaving many French 75 members executed. DiCaprio's character rescues the group's daughter, possibly Lockjaw's, and they go underground under the aliases Bob and Willa Ferguson. The film blends Pynchonian paranoia, generational shifts, and modern political conflicts.
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