The Year the Auteurs Finally Portrayed Present-Day America

"Anderson never made another film like it. Instead, for 20 years, he became America's foremost crafter of period epics, centering his meticulous gaze on 1910s oil barons, postwar religious society, '70s stoner-investigators, mid-century fashion milieu, and so forth. Anderson had an auteur's eye for the hubris and rot underpinning 20th-century society -but our phone-addled, present-day world? It hardly seemed cinematic anymore."

"In the decade or two following Punch-Drunk Love, as society hurtled past some invisible threshold of digital derangement, the most prestigious and prominent American filmmakers seemingly gave up on making movies about contemporary life. Of the 10 movies that won Best Picture during the 2010s (that is, from The Hurt Locker to Green Book), all but one were period pieces set sometime before 2005."

"All of which makes One Battle After Another - Anderson's latest film, and first to reckon with a country cracked open by neo-Nazis, ICE raids and Trump's vice grip on American democracy - that much more exhilarating. The filmmaker loosely adapted Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, a postmodern novel published in 1990 and set in the Reagan '80s, but chose to transplant it to the modern era, an authoritarian milieu not so different from Trump's second term, a world of cruel immigration raids and community-run mutual-aid efforts."

Paul Thomas Anderson's last 21st-century film was Punch-Drunk Love in 2002, which established Adam Sandler as a dramatic actor. For two decades Anderson focused on period epics set across the 20th century, rendering the hubris and rot underpinning those eras. As digital culture reshaped society, major American filmmakers largely abandoned contemporary settings, and Best Picture winners of the 2010s were almost entirely period pieces. One Battle After Another adapts Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and relocates its setting to a near-future authoritarian America marked by neo-Nazi violence, ICE raids, Trump's consolidated power, and grassroots mutual-aid responses. The film registers as disturbingly current.

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