The promotional posters for Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, One Battle After Another, have a 1980s road-movie vibe. That’s appropriate, as it’s an ‘adaptation’ (more on that in a minute) of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, which was set in California during the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. But it’s also a troubling trope for a film clearly embedded in the vibe of this particular moment in US political history.

Vineland is probably my favourite Pynchon novel, so I was mostly interested in finding out how faithful One Battle After Another might be to that book’s storyline. Although I knew already that Anderson was not interested in a traditional adaptation along the lines of his treatment of another of Pynchon’s works, Inherent Vice, I remained curious and entered the cinema in Leeuwarden with an open mind.

This review focuses on the similarities between Pynchon’s novel and Anderson’s film, as well as the latter’s points of departure from the former. It doesn’t intentionally seek to reveal spoilers but, naturally, by reading the review you may inadvertently find out some things about the plot that you might prefer not to know until you see the film for yourself. So, you know, caveat emptor and all that Latin jazz, man.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall some mood-cleansing music from the One Battle After Another soundtrack by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood.

First, the similarities. There are a few lines of dialogue in the film that have been lifted straight out of the novel but, for the most part, Anderson’s fidelity to Vineland shows mostly in his characterisation. Both works focus on a father-daughter relationship, and Leonardo diCaprio’s portrayal of ‘Bob’ (Zoyd Wheeler in the book) is almost as good as my fantasy casting of Nicholas Cage in the role.

In fact, diCaprio’s Bob simultaneously riffs on Joaquin Phoenix’s roach-addled Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice while updating Zoyd’s oddly charming incompetence for a 21st-century audience. For example, during a ‘serious talk’ with his daughter, Bob exhales vape smoke and then surreptitiously takes another hit. It’s classic Zoyd but also semi-stupidly now. Bob is just as hopeless as the next everyman.

Zoyd’s wise-beyond-her-teenage-years daughter Prairie in Vineland provided a necessary counter to both her parents’ questionable activities in the 1960s political underground. Similarly, Chase Infiniti Payne manages to be both kick-ass and vulnerable as Willa Ferguson (aka Blak Prairie), a girl who’s never known her mother and whose putative ‘father’ may not actually be related to her at all.

Which brings us to the anti-couple that haunts Vineland and, in an interesting twist, One Battle After Another as well. Frenesi Gates, Zoyd’s wife and Prairie’s mother in Vineland, infamously became a police informant and then disappeared into a witness protection programme that required her to give up her previous life. She also became romantically entangled in an icky way with a federal prosecutor, Brock Vond.

In Anderson’s retelling, Frenesi becomes Perfidia Beverly Hills, played by Teyana Taylor. While she’s actually a relatively minor character in both works, Perfidia’s brief entanglement with the equally ludicrously named Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) accelerates the film’s emotional arc and provides the jeopardy and danger required for it to go beyond what might have been a straightforward hostage drama.

While there are many other resonances between the book and the film, including the overall sense of paranoia and conspiracy, One Battle After Another is of course a different work. Nevertheless, a brief discussion of its departures from and perhaps deliberate overlooking of the plot points of Vineland suggests what that work might amount to as a piece of cinema in the present geopolitical dispensation.

Let’s get some hard truths out of the way: the closest we come to a reanimation of Vineland‘s most interesting character, Takeshi Fumimota, is Benicio del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos, a karate teacher with a self-professed ‘Harriet Tubman situation’ sidehustle harbouring undocumented emigrants from Central America. And no Takeshi means no Takeshi-DL Chastain romance, which is sad.

Similarly, there’s no sign of Ralph Wayvone, Jr, and therefore no mention of Deleuze and Guattari’s Italian Wedding Fake Book, surely Pynchon’s funniest gag. Perhaps more serious is the omission of the Thanatoids, a community of ghost-like outcasts caught between this world and the next. The novel’s obsession with television likewise gets the chop, but that’s a reflection of the new time setting.

And speaking of that, of course, the most obvious factor distinguishing One Battle After Another from Vineland is the time and place in which it is set. The novel is defiantly 1980s, and early 1980s at that, with a focus on the aftermath of Nixon’s repressive administration which seem to be gaining a new sense of life through the mock-friendly but largely absent medium of Ronald Reagan.

One Battle After Another, in contrast, was filmed in the dying days of Joe Biden’s sleepwalking presidency, and hit cinemas just months after the re-election of Donald Trump. It’s a film that only makes sense in this context, and which serves as a useful reminder to viewers that the cruel and violent actions of immigration enforcement officials, in the United States and elsewhere, remain pretty much bipartisan.

In fact, the film’s switching out of Pynchon’s disappeared radical activists from the late 1960s for a Mad Max-styled extremist version of anti-authoritarian protests of the more recent past is probably its most chilling point of difference. But in reflecting what is occurring at the United States’ borders today, the film transforms Pynchon’s ironically detached fury into something much more potent.

But in the context of increasingly unhinged ICE raids on anyone who’s anywhere, actual authoritarianism at all levels of the US administration, and the widespread social cultural chaos apparently engulfing the country, the film’s white-supremacist subplot (which does for Lockjaw what no other member of the ensemble could) just comes across as absurd. It’s a bum note in an otherwise engrossing film.

Perhaps, ultimately, I just wanted a Vineland adaptation. And maybe one day, one of the surviving US streaming services will commit to an actual eight-episode adaptation, starring Nicholas Cage as Zoyd. Who knows, maybe it would be so successful the show’s backers might even consider a second season, o-or a spinoff devoted to towtruck operators Blood and Vato, or else Takeshi and DL’s unlikely romance.

A person can dream, surely?