Commentary: What 'One Battle After Another' doesn't get about resistance in Trump's America

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The cheers were loud and long at the 98th Academy Awards after “One Battle After Another” won best picture.It was a great night for the Paul Thomas Anderson-directed film, which nabbed six Oscars for its depiction of California revolutionaries taking on a white supremacist federal government hell-bent on deporting undocumented immigrants and crushing dissent.Wait, isn’t that what CNN airs every night?The 2.5-hour-plus film didn’t do well at the U.S.

box office, not even earning back its estimated $130-million budget.But it sparked dozens of thought pieces that kept it in the national conversation long after it left the theaters.

Conservatives decried the action-comedy for supposedly glamorizing armed resistance; progressives hailed its ripped-from-the-headlines élan.Awards ‘One Battle After Another’ was named best picture at Sunday night’s Oscars.It’s supposed to be a movie that Means Something.

But Anderson, who won his first best director Oscar for “One Battle,” has maintained in interviews that people should regard it less as a reflection of our times and more as a commentary on the eternal struggle of American democracy.“There are articles in the L.A.Times from 100 years ago showing this kind of stuff,” he told my colleague Glenn Whipp in September.

“The selfish part is for us to think, ‘Boy, look at what’s happening.I’ve never seen this before.’”That’s what makes “One Battle” far less weighty than critics and supporters alike have characterized it as being.

In his attempt to make a comedy of errors about an era of terror, Anderson missed the forest for the trees about resistance in Trump’s America.His critiques and conclusions are as edgy as a soap bubble.There’s a lot to like about “One Battle” — the tense score, the taut cinematography, the superb casting highlighted by best supporting actor winner Sean Penn, whose ...