There was a moment in the 2010s when Leonardo DiCaprio’s career was consumed by “when will he win his Oscar” talk, and winning for 2015’s The Revenant felt like releasing a pressure valve and we could go back to just enjoying his performances. I hate the phrase “one of our greats” for both its proprietary implication and self-importance but like, Leonardo DiCaprio IS one of our great actors. The guy is rarely in a bad movie and never gives a bad performance—although in grand Oscar tradition, The Revenant isn’t even close to his best work—and he’s got a range big enough that everyone has their “favorite Leo”. My favorite Leo is “unhinged Leo”, the Leo of Gangs of New York and Django Unchained and the second half of The Aviator.
The trailer for Leo’s upcoming film with Paul Thomas Anderson, titled One Battle After Another, dropped yesterday and it looks like a top shelf unhinged performance from Leo. He’s got a gross mustache, he’s in a dirty bathrobe, he’s screaming about his daughter and wearing blue blockers, and I am digging every second of it. The film is loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, which means it is also PTA returning to his Pynchon hyper-fixation, which previously yielded the vastly underappreciated Inherent Vice.
One Battle also stars Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Benicio Del Toro, Alana Haim, Chase Infiniti, and Sean Penn. That’s a banger cast, and Teyana Taylor, in particular, looks spectacular in this trailer. The film itself looks great, a given with a filmmaker as meticulous as PTA. He shot the film around California and Texas, including some truly mundane spaces around Sacramento and El Paso, yet he used VistaVision, which offers a higher resolution format for 35-millimeter film. Most people use VistaVision for stuff like sweeping landscapes and highly visual cinema, PTA uses it for supermarkets. The film also continues PTA’s collaboration with Jonny Greenwood, who is scoring the film.
The film is set for a September 26 release date, which is, once again, not a confidence builder. Warner Brothers believed in the film enough to give it a $140 million budget—$20 million of which went to Leo—but not enough to give it either a summer release, selling it as counterprogramming to superheroes, or a more sensible fall release date and play up the cinematic matchmaking of PTA and DiCaprio. Instead, they’re being wishy-washy with that September date, reminiscent of how they treated Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17. It’s almost like they don’t want these auteur-driven films to succeed…
Speaking of Leo, he’s reuniting with Martin Scorsese for Kool-Aid another organized crime flick, this time set in Hawaii and co-starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. The film is about a power struggle among different crime factions in Hawaii in the 1970s. I am VERY intrigued by the prospect of Dwayne Johnson working with Scorsese. But this is also why I will never believe any “Devil in the White City is happening this time” stories. I will never believe those two will make that movie until I am watching the credits roll. It’s never happening.
