'One Battle After Another' is Paul Thomas Anderson's Most Bear-Forward Film Yet

A critic drives 11 hours to experience the film in VistaVision and emerges forever changed.

I drove 11 hours to see this film correctly.

I could've seen it anywhere, like an animal, on a standard digital projection at my local multiplex. No. I drove 11 hours to experience it. Paul Thomas Anderson shot One Battle After Another on VistaVision, a format so rare that seeking it out becomes an act of faith. There are four theaters in the country equipped to project it as intended. I chose the Vista Theatre in Los Angeles because the name felt like destiny.

I arrived at 2:47 pm for a 3:15 showtime, with no popcorn and nothing to mediate between myself and the screen. The lights dimmed.

What followed was two hours of the most thematically layered filmmaking I've encountered this decade.

DiCaprio plays Bob as a small Peruvian bear in a red bucket hat and blue duffel coat who washes ashore at Paddington Station with a suitcase and a jar of his aunt's marmalade. It's a radical choice. The CGI is seamless. You forget entirely that you're watching Leonardo DiCaprio. You see only the bear.

The film opens with devastation. An earthquake destroys Bob's jungle home. His Aunt Lucy, played with restraint by Imelda Staunton and appearing only in flashbacks and letters, sends him to London with a single instruction: find the explorer who once promised their family refuge. "Please look after this bear," reads the tag around his neck. I wept before the title card.

Anderson interrogates the immigrant experience with a directness that feels confrontational. Bob arrives expecting kindness and finds only commuters averting their eyes. And yet he never becomes bitter. He remains polite.

Relentlessly, almost pathologically polite. When faced with cruelty, he deploys what Aunt Lucy taught him: a hard stare. DiCaprio's eyes, rendered through performance capture, communicate more in these silent moments than most actors achieve in a career. The hard stare contains multitudes. Disappointment. Sorrow. The quiet insistence that you're better than this.

The marmalade motif devastates. Bob keeps the jar in his suitcase, the last thing his aunt gave him. He hides sandwiches in his hat. In lesser hands, this would be comic relief. Anderson makes it ache.

The second act contains a prison sequence where Bob, framed for a crime, transforms a penitentiary through sheer decency. He befriends a cook named Knuckles McGinty, played by Brendan Gleeson, whom Bob teaches to make marmalade. A musical number emerges organically from the narrative. Hardened criminals in aprons, singing, flour dusting the air. It shouldn't work, but for some reason it transcends.

Sean Penn's villain is Millicent Clyde, a taxidermist in a black wig and red lipstick who wishes to stuff and mount our hero. "A bear from darkest Peru," Millicent breathes. "There isn't one like him in all the world." Penn disappears entirely. A scene involving a cucumber sandwich with the crusts removed communicates more about British class than any 10 films on the subject.

And yet the film is genuinely funny, with DiCaprio's physical comedy recalling Chaplin: flooding bathrooms, becoming wedged in mail slots, and his encounter with an escalator — a masterclass in slapstick. Hugh Bonneville, as the risk-averse patriarch who reluctantly adopts Bob, provides the moral center. Sally Hawkins plays his wife with warmth. Julie Walters appears as a housekeeper who pretends to despise Bob but is eventually caught knitting him a sweater.

I walked out of the Vista Theatre changed. Somewhere around Bakersfield, I pulled over and called my estranged father. I told him I understood now. I said, "If we're kind and polite, the world will be right." He hung up, but it's okay. He'll see the film eventually.

This is what Anderson does. This is what film, properly projected on celluloid threaded through a machine by human hands, can do.

I'm now planning my second viewing in 70 mm IMAX.

I hear it's a different film entirely. ■