“LIBERAL MUSTINESS:” One Battle After Another Is a Hit with Critics Because It ‘Aligns with a Leftist Sensibility,’ Says Bret Easton Ellis: ‘There’s a Liberal Mustiness to This Movie.’
“It’s kind of shocking to see these kind of accolades for — I’m sorry, it’s not a very good movie — because of its political ideology, and it’s so obvious that’s what they’re responding to,” Ellis said on “The Bret Easton Ellis Podcast” (via MovieMaker) about the critical reaction to Anderson’s latest. “Why it’s considered a masterpiece, the greatest film of the decade, the greatest film ever made [is] because it really aligns with this kind of leftist sensibility.”
Ellis predicted the movie will soon be seen as “a kind of musty relic of the post-Kamala Harris era — that thing everyone gathers around and pretends is so fantastic and so great when it really isn’t, just to make a point… There’s a liberal mustiness to this movie that already feels very dated by October 2025. Very dated. And it just doesn’t read the room. You know, it reads a tiny corner of the room, but it does not read what is going on in America.”
Of course it feels dated. According to IMDB, One Battle After Another was shot last from January 21st to July 30th of last year, so the film began production only a few weeks before Joe Scarborough declared, “f*** you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden, intellectually, analytically, is the best Biden ever. Not a close second. And I’ve known him for years. … If it weren’t the truth, I wouldn’t say it.” Which means that most of the principal photography occurred while its makers assumed it would debut in a Biden-Harris world – or at least a Harris world.
Given the film wallows in ‘70s-style Radical Chic, Christian Toto asks, “What If One Battle After Another Glorified Right-Wing Terrorists?”
Here’s a timely thought experiment.
What if director Paul Thomas Anderson dropped a far-Right movie into this year’s awards season mix?
The project, dubbed “One Battle After Another,” features alt-Right radicals battling it out with government officials during a Democrat administration.
The protesters ignite incendiary devices around a center where January 6 defendants are being held in solitary confinement, even those who merely entered the Capitol during the “insurrection.” A few milled around outside the building that day, never joining the riot.
Some radicals in the film detonate bombs in government buildings, unsure if any people are still inside. They don’t seem to care.
One radical kills a security officer in a heated moment, helping several J6 activists escape in the process. She’s a heroic figure, sultry and uncompromising in her beliefs. A triumphant image of her firing a machine gun while very pregnant causes a stir.
Her beta male beau (Leonardo DiCaprio) can only hope to keep up with her revolutionary pluck.
By all accounts, the couple and their colleagues represent the film’s complicated but unabashed heroes. If they ever regret their murderous ways, it isn’t captured on screen.
As Toto concludes, “Would that film’s Rotten Tomatoes score stand at 96 percent ‘fresh?’ What if its release coincided with real-world violence that eerily reflected the film’s messaging? Doubtful, at best.”
We saw that play out in 2020. Hoist Nancy Pelosi’s podium over your shoulder? “75 days in prison followed by one year supervised release. The judge also ordered [Adam] Johnson to pay a $5,000 fine and perform 200 hours of community service.” Burn down Minneapolis? The mayor’s wife responds by saying that sometimes you have to stop and “smell the burning tires,” and drink in the sweet sweet eau de cologne of revolution.
Here’s the Critical Drinker’s take on One Battle After Another: “Depending on who you talk to, it’s either the greatest cinematic triumph of the past two decades, on par with Sicario, Gangs of New York, and No Country for Old Men, or a pretentious, morally bankrupt Hollywood circle jerk that glorifies domestic terrorism and is more interested in taking shots at the current administration than crafting a compelling story.”