Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” won four Golden Globes and seven SAG awards, making it a strong contender for the upcoming Oscars.
The “Phantom Thread” and “Licorice Pizza” director has been working on the adaptation for decades — starting around 2001, the time he began dating his partner and the mother of his children, actress and comedian Maya Rudolph.
The movie isn’t just Anderson’s most political film, taking on corrupt government officials, immigration authorities, and racism, it’s also, as Ariel LeBeau argues in GQ, his most tenderly personal film — a movie about a father’s devotion to his child. In the film, Leonardo DiCaprio plays stoner revolutionary Bob Ferguson, an explosives expert who used to be part of the militant revolutionary group French 75, who is trying to find Willa (Chase Infiniti), his daughter with former French 75 member Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). Bob has raised Willa on his own, off the grid, since her disappearance when she was young.
Just like Anderson, Bob is the father of biracial children — he has three daughters and a son with Rudolph. And there are echoes of Rudoph’s childhood in Willa’s story. Her mother, singer Minnie Riperton, died when she was two weeks shy of turning seven, leaving her father, Jewish record producer Richard Rudolph, to raise her and her brother on his own in Los Angeles’ Westwood neighborhood.
In fact, one line from the movie came directly from Richard himself. In the car, driving to try to find Willa, Bob talks about how he often imagined Perfidia coming back to them.
“I thought the person coming through that door one day would be her mom, not this fucking asshole,” Bob says, referring to Sean Penn’s Col. Lockjaw, who captured Willa, “[She would] see her daughter, she’d teach her girl stuff, do her hair, be a mom.”
“I can’t do her hair, man, you know that?” he then tells Benicio del Toro’s Sergio St. Carlos mournfully, “I don’t know how to do her hair right.”
It’s a moment that might feel almost laughable now, where a bounty of YouTube videos exists on this very subject, but for someone like Bob, who lives off the grid, or someone like Richard, who was raising biracial kids in ’70s and ’80s (Rudolph’s brother, Marc, was born just one year after the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, which ruled that laws barring interracial marriage were unconstiutional), it was a reality impossible to breech.
“I actually had a conversation with his father-in-law [Richard] the other day, who said, ‘I’m the one who said that to him,’ about his daughter Maya [Rudolph]. ‘I can’t do her hair.’ He said he got emotional in that moment. It was a family kind of story that he’s trying to relate to his daughter,” DiCaprio recounted in an interview with CNET.
“It’s no secret that Maya lost her mother when she was very young. And Maya’s father really struggled, as a single dad, to do her hair. Because, you know, I can tell you: As a father of mixed-race girls, it’s nearly impossible for me to do their hair as a white man,” Anderson shared with Rolling Stone, “That was something that struck me as a father, and that I really knew was a challenge for her and for him. That’s a very personal line for me.”
In a 2018 New York Times profile, Rudolph spoke about the significance of living as a young biracial girl with no one to do her hair and how her hair, like that of many Black women, was a source of racism and pain throughout her career.
In the piece, she calls Richard a “pretty adorable Jew,” but said that “so much of my childhood was dealing with my hair and being super embarrassed by it, mainly because I grew up being the only mixed kid.”
Her maternal aunts would sometimes come help, bringing out the marcel iron, and neighbors said that in those times, Rudolph’s yells could be heard across the street.
“[H]air products that exist today did not exist when I was a child. The detangling system that I use now on my children [Pearl, Lucille, Jack and Minnie] is light-years beyond anything that would’ve ever happened to me growing up in Westwood.”
She recalled that early in her career, people in the hair department didn’t know what to do with her hair. “They would just say the most awful, disgusting things,” she said.
“My hair was natural when I started ‘Saturday Night Live,’ but it was so thick to get under the wigs,” she said of her experience as the fourth Black cast member of the show, between 2000 and 2007.
She would spend hours with her friend and the head of the hair department at SNL, Jodi Mancuso, in the “blow-dry station,” which was “on the same hallway as a lot of the dudes’ dressing rooms. And every [expletive] Friday night, we’d hear some [expletive] white guy walking down the hall going, ‘Is something burning in here? What’s burning?’ ”
It was through SNL that Anderson and Rudolph fell in love. According to a 2024 Town & Country interview with Rudolph, Anderson “said he saw me in a sketch and said, ‘That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” In a 2022 interview with Smartless, Anderson confirmed that seeing Rudolph for the first time was a life-altering experience.
The line of dialogue about hair, the themes of fathers and daughters that echo in both Richard and Maya’s story and Anderson and his daughters’, aren’t the only way that Anderson’s family made it into the movie.
Willa’s grandmother is named Minnie, an ode to Rudolph’s late mother, and the movie is, in part, about Willa’s experience of losing these maternal figures in her life and contending with that loss. There are little touches, too, like art from the couple’s children being used as props in Bob and Willa’s home. And Rudolph and Anderson’s eldest daughter, Pearl, who was previously featured in “Licorice Pizza,” also has a part in the movie as a weed-growing nun.
And Willa, who is, to Anderson and to many movie viewers, the hero of the film, was an ode to his family.
Casting the right person for the role was more important than anything. “I put so much pressure on finding the right actor because of who I live with, and what I’m surrounded with,” he told Dazed, referring to his daughters and wife.
It’s lovely to think of this movie as not just political commentary and an entrancing action flick, but also as a very personal ode to family and to adorable Jewish fathers trying their best.
