Has ‘One Battle After Another’ confirmed Leonardo DiCaprio as the new Jack Nicholson?
When the first trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another hit the internet, most cinephiles’ instant reaction was to marvel at PTA making what looked like, for all intents and purposes, his first action film.
Obviously, the genius behind There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, and Phantom Thread making a movie with explosions, machine guns, and car chases is reason enough to pay your hard-earned cash for a big screen enlightenment. On the other hand, with his black sunglasses, slicked-back hair, arched eyebrows, and manic performance, viewers are further intrigued if PTA’s leading Leonardo DiCaprio is morphing into Jack Nicholson.
As the Titanic star has aged, his mannerisms, vocal register, and the types of movies he has starred in have shifted to seem more and more Jack-esque in certain roles, such as Calvin J Candie in Django Unchained and Danny Archer in Blood Diamond. He continued to bring that unpredictability and explosiveness in movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for an arching mischievous quality that would only cement his attachment to the veteran he was emulating.
Now, it goes without saying that DiCaprio must have grown up idolising Nicholson, like his peers. To many, he is the greatest to ever do it, so imbuing their performances with some of his rebellious, rambunctious and dangerous spirit is to be expected. With DiCaprio, though, it goes beyond that, perhaps because the former supposedly took the young star under his wing while they shot 2006’s The Departed.
“He really gets into character and doesn’t care who’s listening or who’s watching,” DiCaprio gushed about Nicholson at the time, “And you never, never, never know what to expect with him because he can go off the cuff and just say anything or do anything. It instils a fear in you, I don’t want to say as an actor because you kind of embrace those moments, but in character, it instils this constant fear in you.”
After starring with him in Martin Scorsese’s ludicrously entertaining Boston crime epic, it could be argued that DiCaprio began modelling his career after Nicholson’s. During his run in the 1970s, Nicholson notched an incredible five Oscar nominations and one win, on top of six Golden Globe nominations and two wins, so something must be said of the kind of work choices he was making.
How did he ensure he was always on the best material, though? By almost exclusively working with the best directors in the business. For example, he collaborated with Hal Ashby on The Last Detail, Miloš Forman on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Roman Polanski on Chinatown, and even the movies that didn’t get love from the Oscars saw him team up with the likes of Mike Nichols, Ken Russell, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Elia Kazan.
This approach to a leading man career very much resembles DiCaprio’s journey over the last 15 years, which has seen him win the elusive ‘Best Actor’ Oscar and two Golden Globes. Out of his last ten movies, only three of his performances went unrecognised by the awards circuit, with them still being hugely acclaimed efforts directed by Scorsese with Shutter Island, Christopher Nolan with Inception, and Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.
These days, he only gets out of bed in the morning for the creme de la creme of Hollywood’s auteurs: Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Alejandro G Iñárritu, Adam McKay, and now PTA. He has also religiously avoided making franchise movies or films based on existing IP, like superheroes and video games, and even in that sphere, opting for rare breeds of original auteur-driven spectacle, not unlike One Battle After Another.
So, is DiCaprio fully embracing his status as the new Nicholson? Without a doubt. And hey, I didn’t even bring up how he seems to be following the ‘Mullholand Man’s’ lead in his personal life, too. They have always been committed bachelors with seemingly no intention to ever settle down. Just add it to the ever-increasing stack of evidence!
