One DiCaprio After Another

Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s been making films since 1991, was first introduced to audiences as an appealing young teen. Over the years he’s scored in a wide range of roles, playing everyone from Romeo to the young Howard Hughes (The Aviator) to J. Edgar Hoover to Jay Gatsby. His choices have been remarkably diverse, but many of his best roles have been marked by two characteristics that I suspect are shared with DiCaprio himself: energy and shrewdness. Perhaps my very favorite DiCaprio role is that of real-life conman and charmer Frank Abnagale Jr. in Spielberg’s delightful Catch Me If You Can. That’s the 2002 crime film wherein he bamboozles pretty much everyone he meets.

One thing I’ve discovered about DiCaprio’s recent roles: he’s not afraid to look foolish. As an over-the-hill TV star in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), he escapes death at the hands of the Manson gang by sheer luck. In 2023’s Scorsese-directed Killers of the Flower Moon, he’s downright stupid, unable to see that his uncle’s clear intention is to kill his own beloved wife as a way to steal her family’s fortune. From what I’ve read, DiCaprio—involved with the project from the start—was originally slated to play an early FBI agent. Thomas Bruce White Sr. was a key heroic figure in David Grann’s book, an historical account of the Osage murders and their aftermath. But when DiCaprio and longtime mentor Scorsese decided to focus the film version on the plight of the oil-rich but highly vulnerable Osage, DiCaprio agreed to play the distinctly non-heroic Ernest Burkhart, who genuinely loves wife Mollie but is blind to what’s being done to her.

Now, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, DiCaprio is a man good with things that go boom. but not exactly smart about the world around him. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic film is very loosely based on a 1990 post-modern novel, Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon. If I’d realized going in that Pynchon’s world-view was the basis for Anderson’s film, I would have been far less confused at the start. Pynchon’s writings about America capture the ethos of various eras in a comically exaggerated fashion. This particular novel is about the Reagan era, but Anderson has updated it to reflect the upheavals of today, particularly the militaristic treatment of the undocumented. But here’s the thing: no one is particularly virtuous. Certainly not the military (led by Sean Penn’s crazed Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw), but also not the wildly brutal rebels who confront the Armed Services with their own weapons of major destruction. (Their leader is Teyana Taylor’s unforgettably angry Perfidia Beverly Hills – yes, there are some bizarre names here.) With leaders like these, for which side should the viewer root?

DiCaprio, as “Rocketman” Bob Ferguson (in the course of the film he has several noms de guerre) is Perfidia’s lover and loyal follower, but there’s no real sense that he has any idea about the commitment he’s made to her cause. True,  he’s a dedicated rebel, but against what? In the film’s later innings, after she’s been captured and disappeared, his numbe-one interest seems to be lying on his living-room couch and smoking a lot of weed. But he has another interest too: looking after the feisty teenage daughter who may or may not be his.   

Before I saw this film, I was unclear about what genre it fell into. I heard it was violent; I heard it was very funny; I heard it had meaning for today. All true, but don’t expect to like any of the characters very much.