Still from Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.

I’d read and heard loads about One Battle After Another and invited a friend who came through the long Sixties to see it with me. She has studied the kind of white nationalism that fuels Trump and that fueled Charlie Kirk and his followers. I figured two pairs of eyes and two heads were better than one and I was right.

My movie companion heard some of the same complaints that I heard: that the movie directed by Paul Thomas Anderson was trash and one best avoid it. That was not her stance. She was gratified by the portrayal of the white male nationalists who are obsessed with racial purity as though it really exists and who hire assassins to carry out their dirty work. She thought that Leonardo DiCaprio deserved an Oscar for his performance. Yes!

In an email, one friend urged me to boycott the film as though that would send a message to the director and to Warner Brothers who distributes it. But tell me not to see a movie and I am sure to see it. As a boy my dad would not allow me to see The Desert Fox about the famed WWII German general. His argument: the film glorified a Nazi. I did not leave the theater in awe of Rommel or eager to wear a swastika.

I can understand why some Sixties friends are queasy about........

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