Recency bias apart, did the undisputed Master, for his tenth film, deliver his most universally loved yet? Happy to discuss…
A still from the action comedy drama One Battle After Another
As a film-buff’s filmmaker, Paul Thomas Anderson (PTA) has perhaps only one real Hollywood rival, from among his ’90s, off-kilter, ‘VHS-generation’ contemporaries. And that’s Quentin Tarantino.
Both blessed with a love for music have remained equally careful/conservative with their filmmaking output, perennially teasing their bhakt-type fans, in anticipation of their latest work. Tarantino will soon be on to his tenth film, having announced it as his last.
PTA just released his tenth; action-thriller, One Battle After Another (2025). The near-universal PDA (public display of affection) for which, suggests, it’s his most loved film yet. Is it?
Well, firstly, for a writer-director, there are actually PTAs. And I mean this purely in terms of expanding the cleverly original writing/filmmaking, with a wider world-view, hence, higher artistic ambitions.
Inglourious Basterds (2009) was that pivot for Tarantino. As There Will Be Blood (2007) was for PTA.
Filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson. Pic/Wikimedia Commons
I remember walking across Berlin, in 2007, wholly covered in billboards of There Will Be Blood — wondering if that was the only film premiering at the Berlinale (film festival) that year!
What explained this blitzkrieg? Sure, it was PTA’s first film in five years (since Punch-Drunk Love). But, more so, that it starred Daniel Day-Lewis who, for an actor, is even more frugal with his filmic produce.
Auteurs achieve scale, or go ‘mainstream’, once best-known actors invest in them. Box office be damned. Studios naturally follow. And there are no greater fans of great directors/storytellers than fine actors. Their role is the annual bonus.
How else to explain Bradley Cooper for merely a masculine monologue in PTA’s Licorice Pizza (2021)? And where do you think Joaquin Phoenix’s maddest performance, Joker (2019), emanate from, if not PTA’s The Master (2012), first?
Same thought applies to Indian mainstream. Only, we’ve progressively eaten up every ounce of collective acclaim — press, awards, plaudits, reviews, everything — turning movies into sports, measured by numbers alone.
Also, there’s a perceivable bias for the sorta films from the non-western world that get accepted at the top film festivals, making Indian mainstream actors wary of shutting their eyes, and punting for the same global stage, if at all. This will eventually change, hopefully. Just not yet.
What did a low-key surreal romcom, Punch-Drunk Love (2002), about a loser salesman with seven sisters, do for its lead, Adam Sandler? Showed his staggering emotional range beyond an adorable clown, onscreen.
Day-Lewis could see that. Where did ‘PTA II’ go with There Will Be Blood? Pretty much narrate history of capitalism, religion, America and oil, with three-four main characters, in under three hours!
It sucks the blood outta your brains enough that you won’t rot them over Insta Reels for a while. Great cinema is our only protective antidote to senseless scroll. The screen’s not going anywhere, anyway!
Did There Will Be Blood fit seamlessly into the director’s recurring, personal themes of greed, redemption, power, submission, sexual repression… Hell, yeah.
I guess PTA established his artistic obsession with characters on the fringe — anywhere on a scale between self-absorbed, flawed/frustrated, & fully f***ed up, incel loser — right from his maiden cult classic, Boogie Nights (1997).
It synced so well with Martin Scorsese. San Fernando Valley in LA of PTA’s childhood, that he often returned to, being what Little Italy in New York City, is to Scorsese. And what’s Boogie Nights, if not Goodfellas (1990) of the porn industry?
You can also see how PTA figures the easiest way to place audiences into another world is by literally transporting them into another time; making the period, his pièce de résistance.
Once in, often surveying vast wilderness, what holds you are truths that elevate his fiction, without getting in the way of the story.
And so, Magnolia (1999) may be his most personal film, about dying fathers, you remember it most for Tom Cruise in the ensemble.
That is, if you saw that character through the prism of misogynist seduction communities in the US, that became the rage, at least around me, once we read Neil Strauss’s non-fiction book, The Game (2005).
The Master (2012), of course, makes the most sense, if we literally equate it to Scientology that, incidentally, Cruise follows, in real life. You notice how the violence in the film stays off-scene. Cult and cruelty get conveyed through performances alone. They hit you harder.
Which is why PTA’s ninth film, Licorice Pizza (2021), about a 15-year-old hustler kid, in love with a 25-year-old woman, being his groupie, seemed ‘Peak PTA II’: telling it like it is, so straight out of a novel, and straightforward, shorn of obvious chops to show off!
What about One Battle After Another (2025), with Scorsese’s muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, killing it with that phone-scene, and the theatre laughing, as they did on Wolf of Wall Street (2013), while guns go off?
The setting is both period, and present. The wild zaniness reminds you of PTA’s earlier works, and the deep politics of what defined him later. Such that Sean Penn should walk away with Best Supporting Actor for a white supremacist soldier.
It’s (blended) PTA’s most current movie. I saw its irony and youthful rebelliousness as a love letter to Gen Z, who will hopefully burn through his filmography — once done raving about possibly his most accessible picture, ever!
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.
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