I Have Notes: 'One Battle After Another' (2025)

A movie about Black women, but not for or by us

I have a math problem for you:

If it took three attempts over two weeks to get through all 161 minutes of One Battle After Another (2025), how much does writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson owe me in reparations?

I’m usually not a girlie who attempts to see every Oscar-nominated film before the Academy Awards.¹ Last month, however, I made it a point to watch One Battle after spending this awards season fuming as writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson accepted trophies that should’ve been lovingly hand-delivered to writer-director Ryan Coogler for his masterpiece, Sinners (2025). I’m familiar with PTA’s work: I enjoyed Boogie Nights (1997) back in the day, and There Will Be Blood (2007) was an interesting look into a man’s descent into madness after a lifetime of greed. I began to keep my distance from PTA’s films since Phantom Thread (2017), his movie about A Great Man™, the women who enable his bad behavior as a premier couturier in 1950s London, and his downright-disturbing codependent relationship with a waitress who becomes his muse, employee and lover. I gobbled up the scenes that featured craftswomen constructing couture gowns. Everything else? Don’t even get me started. I need to wrap up this blogletter before tonight’s Oscars, so I’ll sum up my opinion of Phantom Thread with a classic line from the late, great Miss Aretha Franklin:

I was BRACED when my friend Rachel and I sat down to watch One Battle in February. All I knew about the movie was that “everyone” loved it, Black women made up a good number of the cast members, “something something revolution” and Leonardo DiCaprio. After three hours, we’d only made it through 67 minutes. One Battle’s listed run time unfortunately doesn’t include how often viewers like us needed to hit pause, make eye contact and ask each other what the fuck was going on.

I want to say something really poetic and intellectual about this movie. I want to cite studies on the intersections of race and gender in filmmaking. I want to write something on par with more polished critics who can reference obscure but important independent films that you can only watch on Betamax.

Instead, I’m just going to write from my gut: One Battle is bad.

PTA builds a platform for his mediocre white male main character to bumble and ultimately persevere on the backs of underdeveloped, stereotypical Black female characters.² The result is a middling political takedown of a society that’s ultimately the reason why PTA continues to be lauded as an auteur: a film industry that reflects American patriarchy that, above all else, elevates the stories of real and fictional white men who have Something Important to Say™. No wonder PTA wouldn’t talk about politics after this year’s BAFTAs:³

Asked whether high-profile film figures should speak on politics after taking home the BAFTA for Best Director and Best Film for One Battle After Another, Anderson dodged making a statement, telling the press room: “I’ll ultimately fail here, in this situation.”

He added: “Where I have confidence that I won’t fail is by making a film. I have significantly more confidence in myself communicating my feelings about the world through the film, and I think that’s what we’ve done with this film.

“Trying to find intelligent things to say in this form wouldn’t be – I’m not a politician, but I’m a filmmaker, so [I] try to do it through the work.”

Yet it’s the politics that gave the film industry the audacity to attempt to gaslight me into believing One Battle was a great and important piece of modern cinema.⁴

For the uninitiated: One Battle centers on a former revolutionary/current burnout named Bob (DiCaprio) who attempts to rescue his daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti), after a high-ranking official of a tyrannical government kidnaps her. PTA keeps enough elements of the story vague for the movie to parade itself as a timeless satire: It’s set in modern times but there’s plenty of working pay phones; revolutionaries throw around broad proclamations about freedom without a specific strategy beyond fucking shit up in the short term; and the people in power are a parade of nefarious white men in suits or camo⁵ that could’ve be copied and pasted from any movie in which the government is The Bad Guy.

Unfortunately, the multiverse in which we’re currently living is so outrageous that satire needs to be sharp and elevated, and One Battle falls short. Shots of immigrant children playing with shiny emergency blankets while locked up in cages? A secret society of white men whose aim is to keep the country “pure”? YAWN. I hate to break it to PTA, but the kids are still in cages and the secret societies ain’t even secret anymore. You’re going to have to work harder to shock an audience during our era of Unprecedented Times.

Let me get this out of the way: I’m a Black woman before anything else, and my identity plays a huge part in why this movie rubbed me the wrong way. And PTA’s choice of a largely Black female revolutionary group as the movie’s backdrop and his treatment of those characters is where the filmmaker lost me. Members of the group, called the French 75, begin the movie as radical hotheads with a rough draft of anarchy that includes lots of guns and bombs (courtesy of DiCaprio’s character, initially called Ghetto Pat⁶). By the end of the first act, they abandon the revolution and each other with callous selfishness. Now, let me tell you something about Black women — we’re the moral center of this country. We repeatedly show up and show out for our community, the last presidential election being a prime example.⁷ So if PTA wants me to believe that these women would abandon the cause so lightly, he needed to craft fully formed characters with enough depth to make their choices seem plausible. Instead, PTA reduces the Black women in One Battle to objects of sexual desire or caretakers who are ultimately disempowered, save for Pat/Bob’s biracial daughter (more on her later).

Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) is the most blatant example of PTA’s inability/refusal to provide a Black female character with depth. She’s the daughter of revolutionaries who sees her sexuality as the real weapon in this war for freedom, which could be an interesting setup for a more nuanced writer. Instead, PTA depicts Perfidia as a sex-crazed loose cannon who, among other actions, holds aforementioned high-ranking official Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) at gunpoint until he gets an erection and begs Pat/Bob to sleep with her as an explosive they set detonates. PTA wants us to believe that Perfidia is powerful for the way she wields sex, especially in her dealings with Lockjaw. But what’s pussy power when a government agent uses the threat of harm against Perfidia, her counterparts and the movement as leverage to force a quid pro quo sexual relationship onto her?

Somehow, the Perfidia/Lockjaw situation gets worse. First, there’s the ambiguity PTA builds into the script to make the audience question if Perfidia derives pleasure from the sexual sway she has with the colonel. Then, PTA’s direction and writing, along with Penn’s performance, work to make us believe that Lockjaw is in love with Perfidia, even after he forces her to choose between flipping on the French 75 or going to prison. (Spoiler alert: She becomes a government rat and enters into the domestic prison of a pretty house with Lockjaw holding the keys) PTA, you want me to sympathize with a character who shows up to his captive’s house with flowers, but then returns to his vehicle for a battering ram when she doesn’t answer the door? Who juts out his jaw as he reads Perfidia’s final note to him before she flees to Mexico: “This pussy don’t pop for you?” Who has to deny having sexual relations with a Black woman to earn a spot in a racist secret society, then leaves the room with tears in his eyes and sweeping orchestral music at his back? Get out of my fuckin’ face with that bullshit.

I don’t have any beef with how Taylor interpreted her thin character. Her face delivers so much more nuance that the script provides that I can almost believe her character’s choices, especially in the scene where she decides to leave her daughter with Pat/Bob in favor for personal freedom from the responsibilities of a family.⁸

My problem lies with PTA and the entire movie industry, specifically the Oscars.

No matter your place in Hollywood, winning an Academy Award is the pinnacle of an American film career. The recognition gives winners a gravitas that translates to more trust and power (aka, money) from the studios and producers that make this whole thing run. For viewers, the Oscars are shorthand for “good” cinema. The films and roles that earn awards show us what stories are important. Omissions silently reinforce ideas that some people’s stories are more important than others.

For nearly 100 years, the Academy has excluded the contributions of Black women in film. From a lack of nominations to the long stretches between wins, these awards have created a narrative that our stories are less than. Just take a look at the history of the Academy’s Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress category. When the institution recognizes the work of Black actresses, it’s often for roles in which their characters are subservient, sexualized or disempowered. As of 2025, 11 Black women have won an acting Academy Award.

1. 1939: Hattie McDaniel, Gone with the Wind, Best Supporting Actress

2. 1990: Whoopi Goldberg, Ghost, Best Supporting Actress

3. 2001: Halle Berry, Monster’s Ball, Best Actress

4. 2006: Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls, Best Supporting Actress

5. 2009: Mo’nique, Precious, Best Supporting Actress

6. 2011: Octavia Spencer, The Help, Best Supporting Actress

7. 2013: Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave, Best Supporting Actress

8. 2016: Viola Davis, Fences, Best Supporting Actress

9. 2018: Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk, Best Supporting Actress

10. 2021: Ariana DeBose, West Side Story, Best Supporting Actress

11. 2023: Da’Vine Joy Randolph, The Holdovers, Best Supporting Actress

More than a third of those wins were for roles in which the character works in service to white people: two enslaved women, one maid and one cook. Only one Black woman, Halle Berry, has won an Oscar for Best Actress; the rest of the actresses received recognition in the Best Supporting Actress category. The message is in bold-face type: Black women aren’t important unless we’re helping someone else. And let’s not let the memories of Berry’s gorgeous gown (complimentary!) and tearful acceptance speech erase the role in Monster’s Ball (2001) that got her the award. Berry played Leticia, the destitute widow of death row inmate who, pardon my French, busts it wide open for the racist prison guard (Billy Bob Thornton) who executed her husband after a series of events leaves her destitute.⁹ In film, as we are in life, Black women are awarded for being objects: a desired thing to be collected, controlled and used.

I don’t blame Taylor or any Black actress for accepting these types of roles. Options for Black actresses will continue to be limited as long as the bigwigs throw money and accolades at film projects in which the Black women play second fiddle.

This brings me back to Perfidia and the other Black female characters in One Battle. PTA makes their existence pivotal to the movie, but he spotlights checks notes the white guy. Add this to the underdeveloped characters, and you get another film that uses stereotypical portrayals of Black women to elevate the story of another hapless white man.

I will give PTA credit: He gives Bob the same level of character development as he does with the other French 75 members. I don’t believe for one second that Bob, aka grown-up version of the greasy-haired kid who played with matches in middle school, would be involved in a revolution other than the opportunity it gave him to play with explosives and sleep with Black women. Bob’s motivations are unknown, so I’m not invested in him as a main character. Then, when he does have a motivation to knock him into action (the kidnapping of his daughter) he falls short as a protagonist. Things happen to Pat/Bob, but he doesn’t do anything. In fact, it’s people of color who pull Bob along on his quest to find Willa.

AND SPEAKING OF WILLA, she’s the true protagonist of One Battle. Bob doesn’t save her at all; she saves herself. Willa, not Bob, embarks on a hero’s journey that leads her back home and changes her (it’s not lost on me that the light-skinned, mixed-race Willa is the only Black woman in the film who is a fully developed character, but I digress¹⁰). Meanwhile, Bob switches from smoking weed to cigarettes by the end of the movie. The time we see Bob, he’s laying on the couch while his daughter goes to save the world.

PTA wants the audience to align itself with Bob, a middle-aged man who has trouble with pronouns and carries a vague desire to fight the man but no motivation to do so. The misadventures of the character is an attempt to skewer the shortcomings and contradictions of white liberalism. It wasn’t half bad, to be honest — I might have even chuckled a time or two at Bob’s misadventures.

But the writer-director loses me when he flattens Black female characters into harmful stereotypes for the sake of highlighting a white man. Every movie ain’t for everybody. One Battle is a movie by and for white men. And in PTA’s hands, the Black women are decoration. PTA doesn’t have the depth to tell an engaging story that includes well-rounded, complex Black women, so next time, he needs to leave us out of it.

1. Which is tonight! Here’s how to watch.

2. And other nameless characters of color — we’ll get to that in a bit

3. As recently as last month!

4. And it is RICH to dodge a question about politics when you made a political movie. Say it with your chest, for crying out loud.

5. President Fitz, what are you doing here??

6. I wish I was joking.

7. Nine out of 10 Black women voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, according to the Pew Research Center.

8. This comes after Pat/Bob overhears Perfidia talking about how miserable she is with motherhood in a monologue Rachel described as “postpartum depression as written by a man.” Never change, friend.

9. In case you forgot, Sean Combs played the executed prisoner. YIKES.

10. The girls who get it, get it.