Movie Review: Eddington

Ari Aster following up his depraved surrealist opus Beau is Afraid with a satirical western set in the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020 just makes too much sense. Aster already got out of the good graces of many cinephiles with Beau is Afraid, so why not kick the hornet's nest some more by making a film that forces viewers to step back into one of the singularly miserable, bizarre periods in modern history? For better or worse, Eddington is every bit as unapologetically incendiary, bleak and brazen as people would expect an Aster COVID movie to be. 

Eddington takes place in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico in May of 2020. This small desert community has become increasingly divided as they have to deal with the isolation of having to stay at home amidst the lockdowns and wave of national civil unrest sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The most high-profile clash in Eddington comes between the county sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, who once again shines as a deeply pathetic, unhappy man) and mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Cross and Garcia have long standing problems with one another that largely stem from Garcia's brief romantic involvement with Cross' wife Louise (Emma Stone) years prior and Louise's mother Dawn (Deidre O'Connell, bringing a similar brand of off-putting lunatic energy that she brought to her role on The Penguin) insisting that the mayor abused her daughter. After a public dispute over wearing a face mask in the town's grocery store, Cross decides to launch a bid for mayor and bring "common sense" back to Eddington. Everybody from Garcia to Louise to Dawn is livid that Cross has entered the mayoral race at the last minute and all of the humiliation, frustration and manipulation that follows Cross's impulsive decision to run for the town's highest office creates a powder keg that quickly explodes in a fashion that nobody in Eddington could've possibly imagined.

What Eddington understands that no other previous movie that centered around COVID has is that the pandemic didn't create new problems for humanity, it just further intensified ones that were already there. Having a deadly virus that forced the entire world to shutdown be unleashed during an era where brainrot, conspiracy theories and performative social media bullshit all brought on by the vast power of the internet was a recipe for widespread chaos that will be damn near impossible to ever come back from. Living in a world like this is every bit as stupid as it is frightening and that's precisely what Eddington conveys. Everybody is so wrapped up in whatever crusade they're currently involved with that they've ended up ignoring that there are larger forces at play here who are coming to make all of our lives worse and we're all too busy going at each other's throats to realize what's being done to us. Eddington may be deliberately depicting an absurdism-spiked version of the reality we live in, but there's a lot of uncomfortable truths that Aster is exposing here that could serve as an ideal jumping off point for how the civilian population can fight back against this vital technological advancement that has taught us all to disregard our shared humanity.               

Given the sheer volume of targets Aster has in his crosshairs, the narrative eventually becomes really fractured in the second half of the film. Even worse, the effectiveness of the satire coincides with the collapse of the narrative, which makes the whole climatic stretch a bit of a slog to get through despite delivering the explosion of cartoonish ultraviolence that a story like this was inevitably going to lead to. I'll fully admit that a rewatch could fix many of the issues I had with the latter half of the film. I've spent a fair amount of time since I exited the theater early Saturday afternoon reading reviews that offered up really fascinating, well-reasoned interpretations of what Aster put on screen. However, at this moment in time, I still feel like Aster's ambitions outweighed the coherence of his messaging and there isn't enough greatness to be found elsewhere in Eddington to distract from this problem that appears to be becoming a pattern in his movies.            

Grade: B-