In a sharply worded response to Owen Gleiberman‘s 10.19 Variety piece that disputes the notion that One Battle After Another celebrates radical militant lefty agitation, Breitbart.com’s John Nolte states a fair, neutral-minded observation about Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Bob Ferguson, the film’s grungy, bathrobe-wearing, start-to-finish protagonist.
Nolte observes that Leo doesn’t do anything — not one fucking thing — to affect the fate of his kidnapped daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti)
Nolte: “What [Gleiberman] doesn’t tell you is that DiCaprio’s Bob is a moron. Why? Because One Battle After Another only portrays white people as either useless idiots or evil racists. Director Anderson is so exacting with this agenda that every single member of the military (ICE) is white.
“What’s more, unlike Perfida, DiCaprio’s Bob has no redemption arc. When we meet him, he’s a child-like beta male to Perfidia’s oh-so competent girlboss. When we leave him, he’s looking at his new iPhone like a confused chimpanzee. From A to Z, Bob is so useless, you could literally remove his character from the movie and the plot would remain exactly the same (but blessedly shorter). Because he’s white, Anderson will not allow Bob to shape or move any of the action, even though he’s supposed to be our protagonist.
“The only competent and decent people in Battle are racial minorities — especially all the girlboss black women.”
Here’s an actual discussion that happened an hour or two ago between HE and a very adamant friendo…
Friendo: “Leo is the hero of the goddamn movie! And he undergoes a Hero’s Journey that is so classic, it’s practically Old Hollywood. He rescues his daughter from an army of government killers, and redeems himself in the process.”
HE: “He actually doesn’t rescue her. She rescues herself by shooting the Chistmas Adventurers assassin on that hilly desert road. And then Leo arrives and talks her out of shooting HIM when he says, ‘Willa…it’s okay…I’m your dad.’”
Friendo: “If Bob had not embarked on that journey, Willa would be dead. That’s called rescuing.”
HE: “I saw the movie twice. Leo really, really doesn’t rescue her. He just arrives after she’s killed the Christmas assassin, and then pleads with her and says ‘let’s go home, baby’ or whatever. He makes a lot of clumsy, anxious, stumbling-around moves during the film, but he does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to resolve things or save the day.”
Friendo: “But doesn’t his BEING there at the climax count as a rescue? I get that PTA didn’t want to make a glorified Charles Bronson movie. He has gone to the ends of the earth for Willa, out of his devoted dad-hood.”
HE: “Yeah, he’s done a good devoted-dad thing. But Leo hasn’t actually solved anything or made things safer. He hasn’t stopped the bad guys. He’s done nothing decisive or crucial. He doesn’t even have a big climactic moment with Sean Penn at the very end…nothing.”
