There are many things in this Oscar-winning “Best Picture” film that are amazingly contemporary. First, the title. Look over today’s media offerings – movies, streaming series, tv shows, news reports – and it’s just one battle after another (some with vampires). The film, described as a dramedy, black comedy, and satire, is also a story about family love. Best Director Oscar winner Paul Thomas Anderson has developed the screenplay from Thomas Pynchon’s 1980s-set Vineland.
Leonardo DiCaprio is Bob, an active revolutionary in the 1970s who creates explosives to be used by a group known as French 75. His girlfriend Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) is a leader of the group, a fierce expletive spouting woman who doesn’t stop fighting even when she is pregnant.
Her nemesis turns out to Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this performance); she bosses him around and also beds him. He won’t forget these experiences even after nearly 16 years when Perfidia has disappeared and Bob is raising their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He’s retreated to an isolated house where he’s smoking a lot of weed while trying to keep her out of trouble and out of sight. When he realizes that the authorities are closing in, he reaches out to his old radical friends. Unfortunately, he can’t remember the passwords he needs to find a safe rendezvous place. (This scene is one of the reasons the film is called a “comedy.)
We can assume that there are revolutionaries like this still around today, and seeing the world through their eyes is a good exercise. We find ourselves cheering when they upset a raid on a detention facility housing immigrants and when other refugees escape capture thanks a martial arts sensei (Benicio del Toro).
We also know that Bob and Willa’s enemies are also well represented in today’s society. Col. Lockjaw is invited to join a secret white supremacist group known as the Christmas Adventurers’ Club. They are obsessed with racial purity and Lockjaw, Bob, and Willa are their targets.
This is a complicated film and also a fairly straight-forward one. I got to thinking about that during a long car chase sequence over a narrow ribbon of highway going up and down one hill after another. What matters is the relationship propelling that long scene, a father-daughter bond, which we hope is also amazingly contemporary.