Leonardo DiCaprio goes from one California location to another in “One Battle After Another.”

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” is favored to win the Academy Award for best picture.

But, sad to say, the film is also a loser for California geography — and the state treasury.

Your columnist, a believer in California independence, wanted to love a generation-long civil war waged by everyday Californians against a fascist U.S. regime.

Article continues below this ad

But as someone who visits all corners of this state, I found myself totally confused — precisely because I recognized every single California setting.

Characters in the movie make turns in San Diego and are suddenly in Sacramento. Or they run from military assault in Humboldt County and seconds later show up 10 hours south in Lompoc near Santa Barbara. Or they start a car chase on the Central Coast and finish it on desert roads around Borrego Springs in eastern San Diego County.

See more S.F. Chronicle on Google

The movie would have been more accurately titled, “One California Place After Another.”

Why the dizzying geography? The choice appears mercenary, not artistic — a naked attempt to maximize the amount of money it could take from the California Film and Television Tax Credit program.

Article continues below this ad

That attempt has been successful. Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California Film Commission have celebrated the movie’s awards-season success and the $8.4 million in tax credits that helped cover its $57.7 million budget. That’s a lot of money considering that we taxpayers don’t get a share of the profits.

More evidence that the movie is a tax credit grab comes from the plot’s avoidance of Los Angeles County’s San Fernando Valley, where director Anderson routinely sets his movies.

That decision is relevant because state tax credits are 5% to 10% higher for productions shooting outside Los Angeles. Those higher tax credits convinced legislators from the rest of the state to expand the program — from $330 million to $750 million.

That expansion has benefits for politicians — keep your Hollywood donors happy — but the policy case is weak. Independent studies, including those by the state’s own nonpartisan legislative analyst, have found no clear economic benefit to California, or most Californians, in subsidizing productions. Plus, a $750 million subsidy to Hollywood is morally questionable with the state budget in deficit and the Trump administration cutting California’s programs in health care and food stamps.

This reality puts the financing of “One Battle After Another” at odds with its revolutionary spirit. And the jarring geography, driven by those tax credits, makes parts of the film seem unreal and implausible, which undermines its power.

For your columnist, among the false notes are a robbery and a speedy chase scene through downtown Sacramento. As a frequent visitor to those sleepy blocks around the state Capitol, I can testify that nothing moves fast, especially the state employees who walk even slower than they govern. Also, a subplot involving an Underground Railroad transporting immigrant families to the far north of the state was entertaining but ludicrous, given the difficulties of trying to hide Latino immigrants in one of California’s whitest regions.

“One Battle After Another” can be exhilarating, but only when it squares with reality, geographic and otherwise. The film’s best scene is its opener, in which a group of California revolutionaries breaks into a federal immigration center and frees the people held there. The scene was filmed in 2024 in Otay Mesa, a neighborhood in San Diego right on the U.S.-Mexico border, at an actual federal detention facility, with the Biden administration’s assent. It ought to be repurposed into a training film, given the need to liberate detainees from the concentration camps the Trump administration is building across the nation.

The movie’s other great scene is an extended phone call and argument between the film’s lead character, a former revolutionary bomb expert turned Gen X burnout played by Leonardo DiCaprio, and a younger revolutionary answering the phone on a secret hotline for rebels.

Before DiCaprio can gain the help of his former comrades to rescue his daughter, who has been targeted by the U.S. regime, he must answer a series of questions about rebel ideology that function as a password. But, after years of booze and weed, he has forgotten the correct answer to the question, “What time is it?”

DiCaprio begs for an exception (don’t “nitpick over passwords” in a family emergency!), but the millennial-aged revolutionary, sounding like a government bureaucrat or corporate call-center employee, is unyielding. 

“‘What time is it?’” is a key question of the underground movement,” he tells DiCaprio. “Maybe you should have studied the rebellion text a little harder.” Then, he hangs up.

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

Read more about our transparency and ethics policies

A character later provides the correct answer: “Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.” But, as the film races around the Golden State, it never bothers to answer a similarly fundamental question: “Why are we here?”

Which is how “One Battle After Another” lost me.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

© San Francisco Chronicle