END OF THE ROAD?

The first thing that came to mind as I sat at my word processor was how do I write about this without sounding maudlin? I may be many things, but maudlin is not one of them.

And I am not in some kind of funk… quite the contrary… with a few exceptions, I am feeling… and most folks tell me I am looking… much younger than my age which (by the way) is just short of ninety by 22 months.

88… the number of keys on a full sized piano. A double lucky number in the culture of the Chinese. 88 also represents abundance and introspection in numerology, and there is a vast amount of references to the 88 Buddhas in that religion. The Hindustan Times (a journal I feel safe in presuming is probably not on your regular reading list) states:

“… number 88 is often associated with financial wealth; it holds a deeper meaning. It signifies an increase in various forms of abundance, including better health, the development of your skills and talents, and personal growth. This abundance is directly linked to your focus and hard work. If you’ve been actively working towards your goals and dreams, this number serves as confirmation that your efforts will be rewarded.”

That’s a big “if.” At 88, I am none too sure I am actively working toward anything. Whatever, … 88, in ways both good and bad, is what it is I have.

It really is okay. I find that I rather enjoy the moment when I reveal to dinner mates that not only am I the oldest guy in the room, but that I have (usually) been on the planet at least a decade, maybe two, longer than they. There is also the side benefit of younger friends being a partial solution to the problem of having so many of one’s contemporaries passing on.

Alan Trustman (mid-90s) who was not only a big help with my first memoir, Cagney & Lacey… and Me, but who was a neighbor on Fisher Island and a terrific dinner companion, recently died. So did one of Hollywood’s top lawyers, Susan Grode (87), who also helped me with that first memoir. Both of my two college roommates recently passed away as well. Other than my children and grandchildren, those two men were my primary… virtually only… true connection to my native state of California despite it being the place of my birth, multiple marriages, my career, and my formal education (from entry into the public school system at age 4 through graduation from the University of Southern California in 1959).

My second memoir, Before and After Cagney & Lacey, will be out later this year and while preparing an index of names referenced in the book, I came to realize that over 80% of those people mentioned are no longer among the living. The only good news in this is that it substantially reduces the number of folks who might sue me for what I have written.

I awoke from a nap the other day realizing that in my afternoon’s dream I had been visited by my father… twice. You do not have to have read my two memoirs to surmise that my father was not a uniquely significant figure in my life’s story. Aaron Rosenzweig was a decent, good man but not of enough import to invade my sleep. True, he wasn’t asking me to “crossover” or anything like that but nevertheless, I found the “visit” disconcerting.

“… still, thou art blest, compar’d wi me!...” wrote Scottish poet Robert Burns, in his ode to a mouse, continuing, “The present only toucheth thee: But och! I backward cast me e’e, on prospects drear! An forward, tho I canna see, I guess an fear!”

Universal as this meditation on existential dread may be, I don’t think I dwell on the subject to excess. But it does tend to keep me wondering.

There is a time, early in life when you wake up with a pain and resolve to get to the chiropractor or the gym to get it “fixed.” Fifteen or twenty years later, that pain comes along, and you realize that you will most likely have to deal with it for the rest of your life. The next phase is when you wake up with a pain and wonder… is this the thing that will take me out… permanently?

I have come to understand that unless one has a terrible disease, such as cancer or some kind of major organ failure, most of us die relatively unexpectedly without really knowing what hit us. And since most of us have never died before, it is a mystery as to what that thing is that will end it all.

I am in no hurry for anything like the end of days and, always happy to quote from “My life is good,” the Randy Newman lyric which pretty much says it all. Yet I do realize that at 88 the number of years left is most definitely finite. Still, I am not doing much to prepare. True, I had a will drafted… that was years ago. I have a couple of trustworthy executors (decades younger than me, I hasten to add).

I have written about The Romeos (Retired Old Men Eating Out) with whom I have lunch once a week. They are all slightly older than me and each of them talk as if they want to live forever while I continue to scan life’s highways for the right exit ramp.

There are one or two others in my life in this age group. They are, for the most part, attractive and successful gentlemen. I could, I am sure, work harder at getting each of them to philosophize with me about all of this. Of course, that would be an easier assignment if they were not all so hard of hearing.

What’s it all about, Barney? With apologies to Burt Bacharach and Hal David, it just may be the basis for memoir number three… maybe with a piece of cover art featuring that haunting “visit” from dear old dad.

 

 

Barney Rosenzweig

DISAPPOINTMENTS: REAL AND SURREAL

In my review of Hamnet and Jessie Buckley’s award-winningperformance in that motion picture, I put forward the caveat that“I had yet to see Rose Byrne’s performance in If I Had Legs I’dKick You.

Oh, if only that were still true. I would be at least two hours younger and a happier man than I am today.

I will not waste your time (or very much more of mine). The best thing about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the title which, incidentally, makes even less sense than why anyone would want to make this movie…let alone watch it.

It isn’t art. It isn’t good. It does nothing to improve the minds of any who might take it in. There is simply no reasonable explanation for this thing to exist.

Let me take some of that back. People seem to like it. I am toldthe HBO audience has given it something like a rating of 91“Rotten Tomatoes.” Could be, or perhaps in this instance, it means 91percent of the viewers threw ripe fruit at their screens. That thought occurred to me more than once while watching.

Someone labeled this thing a “dark comedy.” Trust me, there is nothing funny about it. Wikipedia, which one must presume has some input from the artist herself, seems to focus on Rose Byrnebeing a comedic star. Let me take exception; Ms. Byrne is about as unfunny as anyone I can imagine and although, for me, her career got off to a decent start nearly twenty years ago as the foil for Glenn Close in the exceptionally good TV series Damages;my memory is there were no attempts at humor there either.

 

At the opposite end of the spectrum. I didn’t expect to like Song Sung Blue for a plethora of personal and (turns out) not particularly good reasons. I don’t know why I am not a bigger Neil Diamond fan. Back in the early seventies we lived next door to one another in the Malibu Colony and never had an unpleasant run in. My memory is that he was rarely home and his house guests were easy to have as neighbors.

Diamond’s PR guy was Joe Sutton, a very good pal of mine and one of the original poker group I hosted in what were then my pre-Malibu days in Century City. It was then the 1960s, the very early days of Diamond’s career. Maybe it was because I never “got it,” about Joe’s client and did not honor my friend’s recommendations about Diamond at the dawn of his career at the Troubadour in Hollywood. 

In my defense, the urban persona Diamond projected was totally wrong for what was then my quest for a country singer to play the lead in my fermenting Indy film, Who Fears The Devil. Even so, even I eventually came to learn that it is hardly possible to be more wrong about an artist than I was about this guy who turned out to be “the titan of the Brill Building.”

Hugh Jackman is another performer who is far from the top of any favorites list of mine, and Goldie’s kid, Kate Hudson, is someone whose career highlights had pretty much alluded me…although, come to think of it, I remember being happilysurprised to see her in Nine… one of my very favorite filmed musicals and a homage to the Fellini semi-autobiographical, 8½. 

My recollection is Ms. Hudson was terrific in that 2009 film and there is even more to kvell about in Song Sung Blue.

The movie is based on a documentary of a real-life Neil Diamond tribute act called “Lightning and Thunder,” andalthough it took its own sweet time to get to the really good stuff, the movie … and Ms. Hudson in particular… ultimately come through to pay off the film’s audience, big time. It turnsout Mr. Jackman eventually does some nice work as well. 

Onward: readers of this space may recall that vampire movies have never been my thing. Oh, damn… I let it slip. My bad. I am sure I was not the only one surprised at the… for me out of context blood sucking in the film Sinners. I am sure most went to this flick because of the superstar qualities of Michael B. Jordan, his urban image, the powerful heroic parts he has essayed, including the iconic Black Panther superhero flicks... coupled (you should excuse the expression) with the opportunity to see him play not one, but two parts in this movie. 

With all due deference to the storied career of Denzel Washington, Michael B. Jordan, who I remember first seeingyears ago in The Wire on HBO, just may be the biggest African American movie star in Hollywood today. 

And, big as that all is, it is sorta beside the point, for mid-way through Sinners… without notice, sans set-up, music cue, or any hint or preparation whatsoever, there… in the Jim Crow South… is all this vampire horror stuff where… in this idiom anyway…seems to me the Ku Klux Klan oughta be front and center. 

Forget that I am not a vampire guy. I am, however, a script fella… and the literary part of this offering is sadly lacking in flow, in style, and in anything but exposition; of which, rest assured, there is an abundance. 

The movie looks good, but it sounds terrible. I refer not to the music or those creaky noises that go with the horror genre, but rather what passes for dialogue in scenes that should … in a movie… flow together. In this horror story they simply do not.

And am I being fussy, or may I legitimately ask what is a vampire doing dancing an Irish jig and harboring a Gaelicaccent? Did I miss something in Bram Stoker? Could be. If you do choose to throw caution to the winds and see this movie, make sure to watch to the very end of the more than two and a quarter hours of viewing time… past the credits. It almost makes the rest of the movie worthwhile… almost. 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

 

THE PRICE OF GOOD TV

 

It cannot be said enough: Donald J. Trump is good television... arguably, over the long haul, the best long-running TV series maybe ever. Americans like their TV, and that fact, more than anything, accounts for why this Olympic level TV athlete has gotten his totally unqualified self twice into the office of the Presidency of these United States.

I totally get it. I predicted it in a column I wrote after the first Republican Presidential Debate in 2015. I may not like reality TV but I find averting my eyes from a train wreck to be every bit as difficult as advertised. What I don't get is what has only now come to the fore. Trump, a TV star of the first magnitude, has somehow lost his touch... gone tone deaf... and America just may... as a result... be saved. The country’s masses probably do not deserve it, but I am awfully glad it has happened.

The "it" of course is the streets of Minneapolis... note, not LA or San Francisco... not even Chicago... but middle America... Minneapolis of all places. Chicanos in LA didn't even know Minnesota had Mexicans. Now, on TV, they see a taco stand in St. Paul and are amazed. Then, in broad daylight, regular folks are dragged from their cars and homes, a young Montessori teacher is shot by some goon, followed by the assassinations in the street of not only another American-born mother but also an American born nurse… not only a nurse... but a nurse from a Veterans’ hospital. I mean, c'mon... you can't make this stuff up.

And while Minneapolis burns, what is Nero doing? Building a ballroom at a cost of 400 million dollars, renaming the Kennedy Center after himself and then closing it down to show who's the boss when artists cancel shows in protest of his ego move. He hosts a Gatsby party at Mar-a-Lago for fellow billionaires for cripes sake… and does so merely hours before the government allows funding to expire for the largest food assistance program in the nation! How tone deaf is that? And how do you get that way after playing a nearly perfect TV hand for over a decade?

The Jeffrey Epstien thing may have taken him a bit off stride, although I am none too sure of even that debacle causing him a real setback. And the latest racist trope is not gonna matter. Everyone knows he has been a bigot his entire life and nobody seems to care.

And it’s not the accumulation of all the years of lies. Our commander in chief has always been a liar. Nobody cared. It did not matter how many times the Washington Post published a running tab on his untruths or how many fact checks the NY Times ran. Trump just flat out got away with it. The grifts? The self-dealing with family businesses and the doubling, if not quadrupling of his personal wealth in just the first year of his second term? I am not so sure most folks even gave a damn about that.

You know what I will hang my hat on? Health care. I am not casting Minneapolis aside. I mean, c’mon, you just cannot send masked, unidentified and unidentifiable, semi-trained (or completely untrained) stooges into an American city and start throwing everyone from moms to five-year-old kids, teachers, and nurses and other caregivers face down to the ground and then into gulag-like detention centers, claiming… indeed celebrating… in national and international declarations, that they are all domestic terrorists, threatening the nation when ... even on FOX .... we can see for ourselves that while they may be domestics... they threaten no one and indeed are not terrorists but are the ones being terrorized!

The Melania movie might have moved the dial a bit. Talk about domestic terrorism. Have you seen that movie? Of course not. No one outside of Florida and Texas has. That immigrant makes $28 million on a documentary... more money than Sharon Gless, Tyne Daly and me combined in over seven years of Cagney and Lacey? Do not let me digress.

It is health care. James Carville said it when he ran Clinton's campaign: "it's the economy, stupid." Stupid us thought the economy was the price of eggs, the cost of bacon... even gasoline. None of it really hurt The Donald. Americans kinda know that grocery store items aren't something politicians can do much about. If meat costs too much, they buy chicken. Can't afford bacon? That's why they make SPAM. The cost of housing? It has been astronomical for years. College tuition? Crazy making, but not something Trump did badly.... or even did. But health care: everybody needs it, and almost no one can afford it… and the government... like governments all over the world... can do something about it. Trump, however, is oblivious.

For too long… years, really… he has talked about having a "concept of a plan," just before he shows us the latest gold filigree at the White House, or the Trump Arch that will dwarf the Lincoln Monument... tone deaf.

Minneapolis and health care. Defund ICE and pay for health care and I personally will lead the campaign for that damned arch. I may even go to the Melania movie.

Back to the question of tone deafness: how come Trump doesn't know this? He's a better showman than me. I had only one hit series.... and, if I must say so, delivered the goods with that one pretty well. Trump has had one hit after another without really delivering very much at all… except bullshit.

How did he lose his mojo? What happened to that magic touch? I don’t know. Maybe the good fairy who has perpetually made America great just entered his room one night and took it back.

However it has all come to pass, I am looking forward to the cancellation of this TV series, and in the meanwhile, God bless America.... someone has to.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

The Art of Making Art

Close up of her.

Close up of him.

Close up of her, looking at close up of him.

Larry Gelbart authored the book for City of Angels, the Broadway hit about Hollywood and the making of movies.

Noting the use of interactive multiple closeups as essential to good moviemaking, Gelbart’s Hollywood Producer kvells, “There won’t be a dry seat in the house.”

Even in a movie about Shakespeare.

Even in a movie about Shakespeare’s greatest play.

Even in a movie with some of the greatest lines of dialogue ever written… c’mon… you gonna quarrel with “To be or not to be?”

Gelbart’s admonition to Stine, the New York novelist and newbie screenwriter:

“Forget all the words to which you gave birth… remember how many a picture is worth; the odds are a thousand to one so get used to it, Stine. The book may be yours, baby, trust me, the movie is mine.”

So it is in Hamnet, a film ostensibly about the death of Shakespeare’s only son and the grieving father’s creation of the play Hamlet. Paul Mescal plays the bard and Jessie Buckley becomes his wife and the mother of his children.

Besides the film being nominated for Best Motion Picture, leading lady, Buckley, and director Chloe Zhao are nominated as well. Ms. Zhao has it down to basics…

Close up of her.

Close up of him.

Close up of her looking at close up of him…

This, at the premiere presentation of the playwright’s greatest masterwork. Add to that Mrs. Shakespeare’s introduction to just what it is her husband does for a living.

There is the illumination on the face of Ms. Buckley, as moment by moment she becomes captivated by what may well be the first play she has ever seen. Now imagine… the play is Hamlet … the greatest play ever written in the English language … and your husband wrote it!

The words the actors speak are like music and, along with the throng that surrounds you in that theatre, you too are captivated… as luck might have it, right there in front of the director’s camera.

But luck has nothing to do with it. The character transitions from an embittered woman, one who has suffered the greatest loss imaginable, to someone who is awestruck by being witness to the gift that God has given her husband.

Close up of her.

Close up of him.

Close up of her, looking at close up of him.

There is also a nomination for the cast… a relatively new category where the contribution to the film of the entire acting company is taken into consideration for an Oscar of its own. Hamnet must win this… it isn’t just the acting of the film’s ensemble… they are all… each and every one, very solid performers.

But there is more going on here than acting. It is the director’s brilliance of selecting faces that look like every 16^th century painting you can ever remember perusing in books or museums. The ruddiness of the English complexion…the plumpness… the shape of the head… the eyes… each actor selected is a perfect picture of the director’s vision of who they will be playing. They are not only talented… they are perfection personified of the physical forms for the roles they have been assigned.

I am more than impressed. This is awesome. To make this movie and perhaps not even need Shakespeare’s words to pull it off. Oh, alright, pepper lines in during the early going to remind folks just who this dude is becoming. Go ahead, have his three fabulous children joyfully portray their father’s witches on an imagined Scottish heath.

This director deserves more than an Oscar. Do the Swedes give a Nobel Prize in Cinema? If not, why not? What a vision. What a talent.

I have yet to see Rose Byrne in If Had Legs I’d Kick You or Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value. I have seen my perennial favorite, Emma Stone being the primary reason to watch Bugonia, and Kate Hudson delivering more than I thought possible in Song Sung Blue.

Don’t care. I am putting it in writing. Jessie Buckley wins. She wins not just because she is so amazingly brilliant and so physically perfect for the role, but because… even though Emma Stone has Yorgos Lanthimos as her devoted director, and Ms. Hudson has probably waited her entire life for this part and this story filled with more ways to manipulate an audience than I can count, Ms. Buckley bought into something… an Asian director, Shakespeare, Hamlet, a love story marked by personal tragedy, and yet, somehow, knowing her director would not for a moment be overwhelmed by any of that while bringing the camera in on a character in wonderment and with total trust in the basics of her craft:

Close up of her.

Close up of him.

Close up of her looking at close up of him.

 

Wow!

 

Barney Rosenzweig

ON NOT BREAKING STRIDE

 

It has been just over 30 years since I moved from California to Fisher Island, a residential community immediately adjacent to Miami Beach and the neighborhood known as SoFi for South of Fifth Street. There are some very historic and interesting things throughout that swath of land, none of greater renown than the iconic restaurant Joe’s Stone Crab.

People have been known to line up for hours for a table at Joe’s. Back in the day, reservations (hardly acknowledged even today) were then all but unheard of.

I never had to deal with any of that. Not, as you might suspect, because of my multiple Emmy wins from that time in the 1980s when my career was on a Hollywood upswing. No matter how I may have flattered myself, I always knew I owed my celebrity status at Joe’s to my bride, actress Sharon Gless, who everyone knew back at the turn of the last century as America’s best-looking cop in a skirt, Christine Cagney of Cagney & Lacey.

Joe’s owner was Jo Ann Weiss Sawitz Bass, the grandchild of Joe Weiss, the guy who created the place over 100 years ago. Jo Ann’s father inherited the business from his father and by the latter years of the 20^th century, the restaurant was hers (later co-owned with her son, Steve Sawitz, who… with his Mom… made it even more successful). Together, mother and son, got to see the place, year after year, being named one of the highest grossing restaurants in the United States while still maintaining items on the menu that any local could afford.

It was a matter of personal pride to Jo Ann Bass that however pricey those seasonal stone crabs would become, at Joe’s, locals could always afford what was arguably the best fried chicken in town at prices below that charged by the Kentucky Colonel.

Besides loving her restaurant, which she ran with the help of her lifelong best pal, Rose Cook, Ms. Bass loved Cagney & Lacey and especially my wife, its blonde star.

Forget reservations, Sharon and I never hesitated as we marched past the waiting throng to be seen by the maître d’ who would stop whatever he was doing, lean into the microphone on his podium and say, “Ms. Gless, party of two. Sharon Gless.” Sometimes, just to mix it up, the captain would call out my name. Either way… never a wait, we never broke stride.

More nights than not we would be seated at what we came to learn was “the family table.” And it was a rare “boy’s lunch” where Jo Ann did not come over to give me a greeting and ask about my then working-a-lot spouse. And those famous desserts? Never paid for one… not while Ms. Cook or Ms. Bass were in house.

Fisher Island was all very new to me then. And very friendly. Sharon was off in London doing a play or in Canada doing her Queer as Folk series for Showtime and I would regularly be fielding calls from neighbors who seemed concerned about my being home alone and asking me to join them for dinner… off Island. I thought it was nice, and a pleasant break from the on-Island pizza joint, the Garwood lounge, the Beach Club, or Renato’s Italian eatery.

What I noticed was how often these invitations resulted in our going to Joe’s. While it is true that the number of fine restaurants in the area has grown exponentially since the mid-90s, even then, Joe’s was not the only high-quality eatery around.

I am not the brightest lamp on the bush, still it did not take me long to realize that rather than concern about my being left alone while my wife was at work, the invites were coming my way because in my company, my hosts did not break stride either. With me along, they could get a table at Joe’s without the wait. All thanks to Jo Ann Bass.

Three decades later, Sharon and I still love Joe’s… rarely do we have a houseguest from out of town where we don’t take them to this iconic eatery… and even though Jo Ann had been less active of late, prior to her recent passing, both Sharon and I are always treated by the gang at Joe’s like something close to family.

Rose Cook has been gone for some time now… we managed that major adjustment well, I thought. Not having Jo Ann Bass check in on us from time to time will take more of an effort. Both Sharon and I will miss our fabulous hostess… still, as far as that big stone crab restaurant in the sky is concerned, I will not mind if it takes Ms. Bass a while longer to seat me at my table.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

Cold

 

Cold

The hordes of Indianians have returned to their state of Hoosierism, taking with them the college football national title and leaving behind one of the coldest Miami winters in memory.

The contest itself… #1 Indiana vs #10 Miami, was played at the Hurricane’s home stadium. It was a great game that left the locals bereft and the visitors (a majority by thousands in Miami’s home stadium) ecstatic. It is, I am sure, fair to posit that most of these Hoosiers had never breathed a moment when they had even fantasized about a national championship that did not involve a round ball.

On January 19, the HOO became the what… and watched, along with thousands of their neighbors, the Indiana FOOTBALL team… and their Heisman Trophy winning Quarterback… win it all. No longer would Gene Hackman be the only star of record in Indiana. The Hoosiers now had Fernando Mendoza!

16 straight games without a defeat, leaving in their path not only the Hurricanes, but cutting a wide swath through a lifetime of grievance, pain, and humiliation imposed for generations by the Ohio State Buckeyes and the reviled Nittany Lions of Penn State. Did I mention Fernando Mendoza seemed to fly into the end zone, defying gravity, to score the winning touchdown that January night at Florida’s Hard Rock Stadium?

The atmosphere was electric, if not warm. There is, they say, something about revenge being best served cold. Exciting as it was, I would have given it all up for another 10-15 degrees on the upside. If you have been anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States this January you know what I am talking about.

Of course, much worse things were going on just west of the home of the Hoosiers … for while the ghosts of failed football teams of the past were being put to rest on that Indiana campus… 600 miles from Bloomington… in Minneapolis… Liberty’s poem, highlighted by the phrase, “Give me your tired, your poor…” rang as hollow as ice in an empty glass.

It was all it took to get me to look for escape in the form of filmed entertainment. Landman with Billy Bob Thorton and a fabulous ensemble cast… now enhanced by the always good Sam Elliott... has ended its second season on Paramount Plus. When comes such another? Not soon enough.

I lurched toward some Oscar nominated motion pictures and was disappointed in Marty Supreme. Good as Timothee Chalamet is as table tennis champion Marty Mauser, and as well directed as one could ask of Josh Safdie… 150 frenetic minutes in the company of a sociopathic anti-hero was more than I had bargained for. There is some real good stuff in the movie, but I suspect little of it (if any) will make the memorable list when that great documentary in the sky, composed of Hollywood’s best film clips, is finalized.

The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) was next. It is a Brazilian film set in the time of that country’s military dictatorship (mid 1970s). It is winning a lot of international awards but I am betting American audiences will find it too long and its narrative too unstructured. It is well made and probably appropriate that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences find a way to honor it with a nomination… if not an endorsement that the viewing public should actually go out and pay money to see this film. Something I do not have to go out very far on a limb to predict they will not do.

My biggest disappointment of this film trio was Bugonia, but only because ever since Poor Things I so looked forward to this next film by director Yorgos Lanthimos. Emma Stone is back with the director for this one and she is excellent (and nominated). So is her co-star, Jesse Plemons. Poor Things, which pretty much won everything a couple of seasons ago, simply had me expecting too much of filmmaker Lanthimos. The Bugonia film is a very good one, it just isn’t the great one I had anticipated. Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons just could win it all, but I doubt it… not in the year of One Battle After Another.

But then…. I am the guy who went out on a limb for Russell Crowe in Nuremberg. Go know.

 

Barney Rosenzweig

 

 

BATTLE AFTER BATTLE

What may be the best film of 2025 is, undoubtedly, the most important film of a very long time.

It is… all at the same time… concise, obscure, funny, terrifying, accurate, necessary, and fanciful. I could go on. The movie certainly does… for just under three hours.

I refer you to Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and I hardly know where to start. Let me begin in the summer of 1955, immediately after my graduation from High School.

It was June and there was a review in TIME magazine of the film The Night of the Hunter where the reviewer wrote something to the effect that the movie was “a bit like using a .45 to kill a ladybug. One admires the marksmanship but deplores the waste of power.”

I have remembered that quote since reading it over 70 years ago, have referred to it more than once regarding any number of movies, and thought of it again when watching One Battle After Another. I thought of it… but quickly realized it really does not apply to this powerful and, potentially, important film.

“Potentially,” in that we have yet to see what the film audience will do with what they see at the nation’s movie theatres and streaming on Netflix. Will it awaken the imagination of the viewing audience? Cynically, I suspect that the potential of this film and its message will be wasted. The movie’s dismal failure at the box office is a strong indicator that I am right about that.

For purposes of this review, I shall put aside the politics of this motion picture. I believe it was Samuel Goldwyn who, nearly a hundred years ago, said something to the effect that “…messages are for Western Union.”  Ironic in that his grandson (Anthony Howard “Tony” Goldwyn) plays a powerful white supremacist in the movie whose significant role is all about “message.”

Onward. The movie is long… very long at 162 minutes. It does not matter. The time flies by. The performances are all … even the tiniest parts… visually and virtually terrific.

In no particular order, Chase Infiniti makes an amazing debut as the daughter of Leonardo DiCaprio and Teyana Taylor, both of whom shine as Ms. Infiniti’s parents. I have never before seen a Latin American sensei… nor can I imagine anyone better at playing such a part than Benicio del Toro does in this film. Regina Hall is powerful in her role, and Sean Penn, as US Army Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw, is assured an Oscar nomination for his performance in this motion picture. There are so many others… and director Anderson has herein proven the point that there are no small roles… as each of the actors in this movie play their parts beautifully and believably.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay for One Battle After Another, partially based on the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon and with a nod to the French film classic Battle of Algiers.

Anderson is a genius filmmaker and unlike the movie, Jay Kelly, which I had to watch twice because I could not believe it could possibly be as boring as it was on the first viewing, I will watch One Battle After Another at least one more time to understand it better and in appreciation for my favorite art form being realized so well.

There is no minimizing the restraint this observer exerted in this review by minimizing the content of this motion picture. It is a very political movie and its truths might sting, yet they are valid. As someone who often categorizes himself as a political animal, I felt it better to exercise restraint and to deal with other aspects of the movie with only a reference or two as to what the whole thing is really about.

One Battle After Another is about revolution. The film begins in Reagan’s 1984 America and ends in the present day. It refers constantly to racism in today’s America… those who experience it by being born something other than white, and those who will do whatever necessary to … at the very least… freeze the country in place with the hope of a regression into a whiter, more Christian country than the one we now have.

One Battle After Another is scary, in that it could provide a handbook… or, at least, a reminder of what oppressed people ought to do. It is equally frightening to see what little was accomplished in those battles of the past and what has/ or more properly, has not happened for those advocates of change.

Director Anderson went out of his way not to mention any current politicians, political parties, or movements on either the left or the right. Still, it is an all-too-real depiction of what, at the very least, we are flirting with in modern day America.

“Be careful,” the aging revolutionary Leonardo DiCaprio says at the end of the movie to his 16-year-old daughter as she is about to go out into the world.

Meant to bring a smile of recognition to the filmgoer and a reminder of the understanding that the battle goes on, is her reassuring response:

“I won’t.”

Barney Rosenzweig