Roads through perdition

Leonardo DiCaprio has repeatedly said that he drew heavily from The Big Lebowski to portray a stoned ex-revolutionary in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another—by far the finest English language film of last year.

- RAJA SEN

In the Oscar-nominated film (available now for rent on Apple TV), DiCaprio’s character does indeed capture a scruffy slacker energy reminiscent of the “Dude” played so unforgettably by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers film, a shaggy dog of a man who stirred his White Russians with his fingers and waged war over a rug that really held the room together. Against all and dramatically severe odds, The Dude abides.

DiCaprio plays “Rocketman” Bob Ferguson, explosives expert of a revolutionary group called the French 75, who is now old and inactive and happy to get high while watching The Battle of Algiers on TV. He has, crucially, forgotten the secret password he needs in order to activate his fellow radicals. This character shares direct kinship to The Dude’s bathrobe-wearing, pot-smoking protagonist, but I do believe that Anderson himself has also channelled El Duderino to create this messy and gorgeous tapestry of a film, one where a rug rolls over a “Viva La Revolucion” trapdoor, and where things that don’t normally go together team up like peanut butter and jelly.