Eddington

7

I’m not really sure what happened to this film. I feel like its director, Ari Aster, was on some sort of meteoric rise before its release and then it just kind of came and went. Despite the cast involving probably the two highest-profile actors in Hollywood at the time in Pedro Pascal and Emma Stone. Granted, neither is a Chalamet or can open a film like prime-time Tom Cruise, but I thought an up-and-coming director and two bankable stars might drive this thing beyond the kind of niche neo-western about COVID’s America it turned out to be. A director known for some seriously weird and disturbing films trying to make something a little more conventional narratively. Not exactly in the vein of a Civil War, but certainly in the same modern social commentary conversation.

It’s late May 2020. If you’re reading this, you’re old enough to remember COVID and lockdowns. We’re thrown into small-town American, specifically a dusty town in New Mexico called Eddington. Mayor Ted Garcia (Pascal) has enacted a lockdown and masking per the governor’s orders. This angers pretty much nobody other than the weirdo sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). So much so that he decides to run against Mayor Garcia in the upcoming election. Garcia being a logical, pro-business candidate is looking to boost the town’s revenues by allowing the building of a new data center. Very much of the time. Cross being a kook and crank, married to an emotionally damaged wife (Emma Stone) and living with his 4-chan-come-to-life, conspiracy theorizing mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell). His whole home situation is kind of icky and depressing. Which seems to drive his increasingly abhorrent behavior and erratic thought processes.

Now, look, I like Joaquin Phoenix. Obviously, so does Ari Aster, after making him the star of his last two movies, including his last absolute creepfest, Beau Is Afraid. But his mumbling, almost anti-charasmatic act here doesn’t really serve the film. As the kids would say, he has negative aura. I imagine he’s supposed to be unlikable, but he is like Joaquin Phoenix-level unlikable. To the point that we don’t even feel bad for him being married to the much-younger Emma Stone, who clearly has never invited any kind of intimacy. He’s just super off-putting. His bizarro parroting of right-wing twitter and all that escalates in a really unnatural way, mostly driven by suggestion (subliminal or otherwise) from his mother-in-law, who he seems to have a closer relationship with than his own wife. Speaking of, I’m not really sure why Emma Stone is in this film. She serves as the kind of diverging strain of conspiracy theorists, as her growing alienation from her husband and mother drives her toward a predatory grifting cult leader, Vernon Peak (Austin Butler). A man with all the charisma that her husband doesn’t have. But is also clearly meant to represent the cynical and dangerous “my pain is your pain” industry of preying on vulnerable women. Point is, Stone’s whole deal is less about acting and more just being a ghostly representation of bad decision making and the online self-help grift. One who eventually vanishes into Peak’s cult, focusing Cross’ isolation and paranoia.

As Sheriff Cross’ personal life unravels he becomes increasingly unhinged. Though, again, things escalate really quickly. And this is where the Aster of it all comes in. His movies are not meant to be taken literally. They are allegories or kind of nightmarish representations or mirrors of our society. They are hyperbolic and get violently bonkers once that breaking point is hit. Which I suppose I should have expected. But somehow grounding this in a neo-western wrapper, I thought this might be a more nuanced investigation of what happens to people like Cross, who are under pressure and have the two red and blue sides of America crashing in on him. But, no, there’s no subtlety here. It goes off the rails quick. Protests erupt, kids are out on the street protesting police brutality where there is none. They’re supporting Black Lives Matter where there are no black people — save one of Cross’ deputies. And then — in the blink of an eye — everything turns ultra-violent. All of a sudden this isolated town is invaded by ISIS-like left-wing terrorists (or maybe they’re right-wing?) and everything explodes both literally and figuratively. People get maimed and die and things go completely insane. This is Aster.

Ultimately, after the escalating chaos, we are left with what I think is supposed to be a cautionary tale. But also not a cautionary tale, because we’ve honestly already lived through the epilogue of the film. It can’t be cautionary if the outcome we’re supposed to be warned against has already occurred. Aster turned the lens on America during that 2020 era, showing us an unreality to reflect back to us the fact that our online culture and the echo chambers we all lived in didn’t even allow us to agree on what reality we were living in. So, like I said, this isn’t really supposed to represent real life, but rather where and how we ended up where we are because I guess the bad guys won? Because, in the end, things in Eddington — the reality that they settle into — is dystopian and pretty darned depressing. Which, truth be told, doesn’t feel too far off where we are to begin 2026. The worst people are rewarded for being the worst and the people whose conspiracy theories drove the narrative are in charge. Mostly. When it comes down to it, Eddington was thought-provoking, but mostly in a retrospective way. So, not cautionary, but representative. It doesn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know if you spend more than ten minutes watching the news or scrolling twitter every day. And, frankly, we don’t need to be reminded that the bad guys won. We live that reality each and every second.