Why ‘One Battle After Another’ Has the Perfect Ending

The following post contains SPOILERS for One Battle After Another. Do you find that to be be true?

With a 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and awards prognosticators calling it a clear frontrunner in multiple categories at next year’s Oscars, I’m not sure Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another needs much defending at this point. Its richly detailed performances, live-wire VistaVision cinematography, and nerve-jangling score are plainly self-evident. Most people I’ve talked to about it agree: This Paul Thomas Anderson guy, he, y’know, he might actually be a pretty decent director.

For the best evidence of that, I recommend studying the film’s ending, a kinetic chase through the California desert. I have read and heard some minor criticisms of the sequence, even from people who otherwise liked One Battle After Another — criticisms mainly focused around on the fact that the lead characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn never actually square off after the latter’s pursuit of the former spans the rest of the film, rendering the conclusion a bit anticlimactic. As a result, after three hours of political commentary, stoner humor, and a web of intense onscreen relationships, the film just kind of stops after a car chase.

But what a car chase, one that uses action, setting, and camerawork to wrap up every major storyline and theme in the film in a beautiful little bow, one compact enough that Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson could use it to tie up his crappy little ponytail to keep his hair out of his face.

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The film’s finale is the culmination of a 16-year-old grudge held by Penn’s Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, a member of the U.S. Military who wants to join a secret society of white supremacists called the Christmas Adventurers. Unfortunately for Lockjaw, he had a dalliance 16 years prior with an African American militant named Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), apparently a big no-no in white supremacist clubs that worship Santa Claus. Lockjaw and Perfidia’s tryst might make him the biological father of her daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), so Willa’s very existence imperils his application for membership in the Christmas Adventurers.

Willa lives with Bob (DiCaprio), Perfidia’s former lover and (Bob assumes) the father of her child. After 16 years of searching, Lockjaw finally finds and grabs Willa, and is able to confirm via a DNA test that she is his daughter. He tries to pay a mercenary (Eric Schweig) to kill her (his own child!) but the bounty hunter refuses. Instead, he reluctantly agrees to deliver Willa to a militia group that will accept the contract, no questions asked. The mercenary drops Willa off with the militia then has a change of heart and frees her, which allows her to escape in his car.

That sets up a three-way chase: Willa pursued by Tim (John Hoogenakker), one of the Christmas Adventurers, with Bob desperately trying to reach her before he does. The three cars follow one another through an mountainous expanse of Southern California, on a desert highway filled with a series of enormous hills. Willa cleverly stop her car right at the apex of one blind summit; by the time Tim spots her car parked in the middle of the road, it’s too late to prevent a crash. After he stumbles out of the wreck and can’t properly respond to her secret French 75 passwords, she shoots him. That’s when Bob finally arrives and the two drive off together into a literal and proverbial sunset.

Astonishingly, this bombastic conclusion was not in One Battle After Another’s original script. According to Anderson on The Big Picture podcast, the film went into production not quite knowing how the conflict between Bob, Willa, and Lockjaw would resolve. It wasn’t until Anderson discovered the hilly stretch of road featured in the finale on a location scout — an area near Highway 78 and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in Southeastern California the crew dubbed “The River of Hills” — that he realized how vertiginous point-of-view shots from the perspective of a driver in this area looked.

Anderson told The Credits he viewed the location as “a gift from the movie gods” because “after years of driving and looking for something, anything, it had emerged to us, and we just ran with it.” At that point, he began to build One Battle After Another’s entire climax around it. If that’s true, it surely ranks among the most brilliant feats of improvisatory filmmaking in recent history.

The River of Hills fits seamlessly into the tale Anderson tells throughout One Battle After Another. Most obviously, its quick succession of peaks and valleys mimics the film’s title, and with the endless series of small but infuriating hassles Bob faces throughout the film: A phone with a dead battery he can’t find anywhere to recharge, a French 75 password he can’t remember because he’s swaddled his brain in drugs for the last decade and a half. The whole film is one battle after another. Life for Bob — and really for all of us — isn’t a mountain we must climb. It’s more like a series of countless ups and downs on a road that stretches all the way to the horizon.

But the importance of the River of Hills goes deeper than that. Some viewers have reported feeling queasy during One Battle After Another’s chase, especially during those POV shots through the trio of cars’ windshields. That}s actually where the name came from; those shots made some people seasick, hence a river of hills.

And it’s true; those shots visually resemble what you might see from the front of a boat passing through rough water. That connects the location back to the final words of advice Bob receives from Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro), Willa’s karate instructor who becomes something of a zen spiritual guru to Bob as he searches for his missing daughter.

Shortly before Sergio shoves Bob out of his car at about 30 miles an hour so he doesn’t get arrested for the second time in 24 hours (don’t drink and drive kids), the frazzled ex-revolutionary asks Sergio “This is the end of the line, huh?” To which Sergio responds “Not for you! Ocean waves, ocean waves…”

A few minutes later, Bob is piloting a car through the choppy asphalt waters of the River of Hills. The name PTA coined — “The River of Hills” — even evokes Willa’s mother, Perfidia Beverly Hills, who is absent from One Battle After Another after its first act, but whose actions 16 years prior loom over everything happening on that road.

It’s also hugely important that after all the chasing and jumping out of cars and drinking and driving Bob does not really save Willa; she saves herself. Most of One Battle After Another’s middle third focuses on Bob after he gets the call from the French 75 confirming that Lockjaw has finally found him. When Bob answers the phone, he’s smoking a joint on his coach and watching The Battle of Algiers.

Although Bob was an explosives expert and revolutionary before Willa was born, 16 years later he’s a borderline shut-in. He lives in a shack in the woods, doesn’t own a cell phone or a computer, and spends his time playing Steely Dan covers with his buddies. (Relatable.) It feels wrong to call Bob a “helicopter parent”; Bob is way too scared to ever let Willa near a helicopter. He‘s more like a wet blanket parent, smothering his daughter and doing whatever he can to diminish her contact with the outside world and with anything fun or remotely dangerous.

That attitude is totally understandable given Bob’s past, especially his abandonment by Perfidia. And it’s also clear that Bob is a good dad, at least as far as his neuroses and substance abuse allows. The karate classes Willa takes from Sergio, for example, come in handy when she’s kidnapped by Lockjaw. The way she fires a gun while hiding out with a sisterhood of revolutionary nuns just before Lockjaw catches up with her suggests it’s not the first time she’s held an assault weapon.

In other words: Bob prepared her well for this moment. But the moment wouldn’t have nearly the same emotional impact if Bob managed to track down Tim, or somehow killed Lockjaw himself. In order for the film’s ending to mean something, Willa has to apply the knowledge she’s been given by Bob to stop them herself — which is exactly what she does.

That’s makes what Bob does even more powerful: He simply keeps showing up. After being abandoned by Perfidia, Bob hung around. When Willa’s in trouble, he leaves his house, even though he really wanted to watch The Battle of Algiers and he’s stoned as f—, and he can’t remember any of the passwords he needs, and his one safe phone is dead, and he falls off a roof, and he gets arrested, and he has to break out of police custody, and he gets shot at. He just never quits.

When Bob rolls up after Willa kills Tim, she screams the French 75’s passwords at him, and he eventually responds. After all of the trials and tribulations, she asks him the most important question: “Who are you?” And he gives her the only appropriate response, true in every way that matters. “It’s your dad.”

In One Battle After Another’s epilogue, Bob takes a few tentative steps towards reengaging with the world. He allows cell phones into his home and even uses one to take a couple of selfies. When they receive some sort of distress call on their French 75 radio, Willa sets off to help without Bob, who stays behind to smoke some more weed and play around with his new phone.

Hope for the future, One Battle After Another tells us, won’t be found in a heroic father slaying a mythic enemy. Fatherhood is not about winning; it’s about surviving to fight another battle. That’s why it’s crucial Bob and Lockjaw never interact during that final chase. Although Lockjaw dies, the organization he so desperately wanted to join has not been beaten, or even diminished. The Christmas Adventurers are still out there.

Despite that fact, Anderson still finds reason for optimism in the image of a dad so devoted to his daughter that he gave her the tools she needed to survive in a dangerous world, and found the confidence to let her head off into it to find her own way in stormy seas.