Warning: This piece contains some spoilers for the movies One Battle After Another, Eddington, and The Mastermind.About a third of the way into One Battle After Another, the hilarious Thomas Pynchon-inspired film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson, comes a moment whose absurdity and shrewdness reveals the idiocy of its white male protagonist, Bob Ferguson (Leonardo DiCaprio). It occurs after Bob receives a call from the revolutionary group the French 75, informing him that not only have they evacuated his endangered teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti), but also soldiers under the orders of the wicked Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) are closing in on his secluded Northern California home. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]High and exhausted, Bob arrives at a payphone dressed in black sunglasses, a beanie, and a red-plaid bathrobe to call the resistance hotline for the rendezvous point where he can collect his daughter. But a frustrated Bob can’t remember the codespeak answer to the question “What time is it?” He nonchalantly responds to the by-the-books operator with, “Let’s not nitpick over the passwords.” As Johnny Greenwood’s prickly piano score clicks and clangs, Bob, driven by worry for his child, becomes so irritable he causes the operator to hang up on him. One Battle After Another is brimming with moments like this one, which reveal both Bob’s love for his daughter and his ineptitude as a revolutionary. Bob isn’t a total change of pace for DiCaprio. Lately, in movies including Killers of the Flower Moon, Don’t Look Up, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the actor has made Dumb White Man a recurring comedic persona. And nor is the movie fully unique among on-screen works this year which have humorously critiqued the political role of white men. Movies like Eddington and The Mastermind also render their white male protagonists as ill-prepared and ineffectual numbskulls incapable of confronting their era’s racial and social politics. Read more: One Battle After Another Delivers Grim Comedy, Exhilarating Action, and a Pitch-Perfect Leonardo DiCaprio in a BathrobeOne Battle’s sympathetic but burnt-out revolutionaryOf the three films, One Battle After Another is the most sympathetic to its white male protagonist. Anderson provides an understandable reason for Bob’s incompetence: a broken heart. Formerly known as Pat Calhoun a.k.a. Ghetto Pat, Bob was an explosives expert for the French 75—a resistance group akin to the Weather Underground—whose faith was shaken when, following a botched bank robbery, his fellow revolutionary and romantic partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor) ratted out their comrades to Lockjaw in return for witness protection. Her arrangement directly caused Lockjaw to murder several French 75 members and Pat to flee with their daughter Charlene, changing their identities to Bob and Willa Ferguson. Tellingly, these names belonged to a deceased mother and son, foreshadowing that Willa will eventually become a kind of parent to Bob. Because without Perfidia’s cutting charisma and actionable will—curiously we never learn specifics about either her or Pat’s political ideology or goals—Bob, over the course of 16 years, deteriorates into an aloof agitator saddled with a drug and alcohol habit. With apt timing, manner, and physicality, DiCaprio translates Bob’s foolishness into a dazzling comedic show. Drags from his vape make his parent-teacher conference a hilarious sequence while his bumbling delivery—such as defending his late-night escapades to Willa by quipping that “he knows how to drink and drive”—convert the absurd into hearty laughs. Conversely, a deadly serious Lockjaw, who wants entry into a powerful white nationalist group as ridiculous as it is violently racist, viciously wields the military to invade Bob’s town. Lockjaw is targeting Willa for personal reasons: She’s proof that Lockjaw coerced Perfidia into having sex with him in exchange for her freedom. Despite the grave threat, Bob, of course, can’t remember the codespeak necessary to locate Willa. Instead, a frazzled Bob turns to Willa’s karate instructor, Sensei Sergio (Benicio del Toro), for help. Del Toro’s Sensei is the linchpin of Anderson’s lampooning of white allies like Bob. Despite Lockjaw’s raid of their town, which reads as akin to an ICE campaign, Sensei isn’t frightened, confused, or shaken. He calmly drives Bob through fiery militarized streets toward his home, where he fires up his vast immigrant protection network. While Bob struggles to charge the low-tech phone that’ll connect him with the French 75, Sensei coordinates skateboarders as messengers and directs his relatives and employees to evacuate the dozens of migrants his family is sheltering to a nearby church. As Bob throws a tantrum with the resistance’s obstinate operator, Sensei procures a rifle for Bob too. Amid the chaos, Sensei even finds time to calmly introduce, one by one and by name, the family and immigrants living in his household to Bob. Sensei performs other miraculous works: employing hospital employees to help Bob escape police custody, acting as Bob’s getaway driver, and transporting him to Willa’s rendezvous point in the California desert once he finally obtains it—while providing sanctuary to undocumented people. Read more: The 46 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2025Nevertheless, Sensei’s most important moment nearly passes unrecognized. When Bob laments the trouble he’s brought to Sensei’s door, Sensei softly chides: “We’ve been laid siege to for hundreds of years. It’s not your fault. Don’t get selfish.” The quiet denouncement of Bob’s martyrdom complex points to people of color’s self-sufficiency. Tellingly, the direct action by minority activists like Sensei is both community-based and takes place quietly in the background of Bob’s self-centered outbursts. It’s no accident that a petulant Bob pulls a Karen on the resistance’s operator by demanding to speak with their manager while Sensei dutifully toils away. Because Anderson keeps Bob’s ideology in the shadows—he’s loosely far-left—it’s worth considering that apart from Bob’s fetishization of Perfidia (they’re attracted to one another’s traits: her Blackness and his explosive expertise, rather than their personalities), it’s unclear whether he ever was a devoted revolutionary or if his attraction for Perfidia brought him into the fold. In fact, Bob wanted Perfidia to leave the French 75 so they could raise their daughter together. And while Anderson certainly champions Bob’s fatherly love—a white father searching for his biracial daughter calls to mind the family Anderson has raised with Maya Rudolph—it isn’t a coincidence that through Sensei’s pro-immigrant network Anderson offers an example of someone balancing the familial with the political. That vision probably inspires Bob to allow Willa to join the fight at the end of the film.Eddington’s send-up of the white Western heroAri Aster’s Eddington, on the other hand, presents a less movable white protagonist in a more tangible world. While One Battle After Another only makes allusions to ICE, Mar-a-Lago, and 2020’s anti-police protests, Aster’s film plainly interrogates ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, data farming centers, and other events that surged during the COVID-19 pandemic through the eyes of the dimwitted, anti-masking, small-town New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). Unlike the fatherly Bob, Joe is a selfish, self-absorbed man compelled to run for mayor against his smarmy rival Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) to assert his authority to those who are increasingly onto his lack thereof—his mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), wife (Emma Stone), and perhaps most of all, himself. Aster keenly satirizes Joe’s idiocy in the face of social upheaval through the iconography of Westerns. Cinematic lawmen like Little Bill in Unforgiven and Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine—films that inspired Eddington—commanded their towns with a near iron will. When Joe is called to disperse a BLM protest, in a scene akin to a gunfight, Aster center-frames Joe and his deputies walking down Main Street from a low angle. Despite Joe adopting the swaggering walk of a Western hero, he is quickly overwhelmed with video evidence of his earlier violent confrontation with a houseless man. Though Aster’s mocking of the young white activists discovering their political identity, or just protesting to impress a girl, feels like punching down, in this moment the director also cuts down the archetype of the white Western hero—racist, misogynistic, and genocidal white male figures valorized in American pop culture. Much like Anderson does, Aster also juxtaposes the ineptitude of his white protagonist with an adept person of color. When a frustrated Joe murders Ted via a sniper rifle, he obstructs Pueblo Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) by claiming jurisdiction and tampering with the crime scene. Like Sensei, Jimenez does his work in the background: checking tire tracks and analyzing the handwriting behind the fake BLM message Joe spray-painted on Ted’s wall to implicate the young activists. Joe even tries to frame his Black deputy Michael (Micheal Ward), with Ted’s death. At every turn, Joe undermines people of color, and Aster, to his credit, makes Joe pay for it when paid-agitators posing as ANTIFA permanently paralyze him in a brutal attack. Fascinatingly, one of the young white activists, Brian (Cameron Mann), becomes a Kyle Rittenhouse-type talking head while Joe is elected mayor. Though Joe has attained power, becoming the respected white hero he envisioned, he is nothing more than a frozen figurehead confined within his own body, a puppet for his conspiracy-addled mother-in-law who now wields the real power. The Mastermind’s incompetent, entitled would-be art thiefIf Bob in One Battle After Another is the progressive white hero and Joe in Eddington is the conspiratorial right-wing champion, then James Blaine Mooney (Josh O’Connor), the selfish white male protagonist in Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, is the apathetic white aesthete. He is an art school dropout, hailing from a privileged New England family—his father is a judge—who’s financially supported by his tireless wife (Alana Haim) and his wary mother (Hope Davis). While he isn’t particularly talented or smart, he believes he deserves acclaim, so he’s concocted what he believes is the perfect plan to steal four Arthur Dove paintings from his local art museum (the film is loosely based on the 1973 robbery of Massachusetts’s Worcester Art Museum). For various reasons—his kids are off from school during the robbery; his getaway driver drops out; his hotheaded gunman arouses suspicion—his haphazard caper doesn’t lead to riches. He is instead forced to flee from his family to Ohio.While most movies would try to paint James as a sympathetic figure, a white man whose stymied ambitions are worth lamenting, The Mastermind doesn’t. Let’s consider that the protagonist of Reichardt’s previous film, Showing Up, was a woman artist (Michelle Williams) whose world might easily be dismissed as frivolous and insular compared to the major real-life political upheaval occurring outside of her manicured Northwestern American art school. Showing Up’s potentially myopic perspective contrasts significantly from Reichardt’s Night Moves, a film about radical white environmental activists whose designs of blowing up a dam backfires, causing their inept leader Josh (Jesse Eisenberg) to erratically cover his tracks. Taken together, Showing Up and Night Moves thematically foreshadow Reichardt’s critique of James in The Mastermind by purposely pushing real-world problems to the margins. The film’s era is imperative: Set during the 1970s, the decade that probably inspired the French 75’s defiant approach, The Mastermind situates the Vietnam War in James’ periphery. On the television at James’ home, we hear news reports on the growing cynicism toward the conflict; while sipping a drink at a bar, James overhears a trio of Black men sharing their wartime stories; as he doctors a passport in his hotel room, the sound of choppers and gunfire fills the space. James pays little attention. He even resents the hippie outfit his friend loans him, along with his buddy’s suggestion that he escape toward Canada for a commune housing draft dodgers and radical feminists. Not unlike those who have ignored the genocide in Gaza, James remains detached from the geopolitical and humanitarian crimes happening around him. And similar to Aster, in a scene I will not spoil but whose irony would befit the Coen Brothers, Reichardt doesn’t allow James to escape responsibility: He is dragged into the reality of his era. One Battle After Another, Eddington, and The Mastermind all comedically register white men as useless political collaborators. In One Battle After Another, Bob is clueless about the ICE raids happening around him. In Eddington, Joe co-opts the righteous anger of BLM. In The Mastermind, James ignores the war taking place in the background. While these white men’s remoteness aren’t of equal consequence—Bob is the most sympathetic because he’s thinking about the safety of his daughter—they’re all uniformly moronic people. Their idiocy in turn reveals the professionalism of people of color and the direct action that occurs when they are not present.