Up front: I am not the world’s biggest Ari Aster booster. You might even say I was a tad Ari-nostic about his over-committed and insistent works that, if nothing else, are coloured by the fact that the success of his 2018 feature debut, Hereditary, has allowed him to work freely from the traditional constants of the Hollywood machine.
With Eddington, it feels a little like he’s wound his own leash in a tiny bit following the aggressively indulgent, pseudo-Freudian clusterfuck that was 2023’s Beau is Afraid, but this new one comes across as if the filmmaker is trying once more to force a litany of good ideas, solid ideas and some bad ideas in a jar that just doesn’t have space to fit them all.
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America was already some way down the road of auto-destruct by the year 2020, with President Donald Trump having already pounced on the convenient capacity of electronic media to obscure the nature of common-sense truth. In the sleepy township of Eddington, New Mexico, sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refuses to employ his state-mandated powers to enforce mask usage during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, seeing the global pandemic which laid waste to millions of lives as somebody else’s problem. No-one has it in Eddington, so maybe it doesn’t exist?
Incumbent mayor of Eddington, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), meanwhile, demands that Cross put his unhelpful personal beliefs aside and promote public safety during this unprecedented moment. Though he may be responsible for slick, manipulative campaign videos and seems like an intellectually reliable and empathetic political candidate, Garcia, it transpires, is merely a pawn for the wider party, but also for shady big tech interests who want to open a resource-sapping server farm on his territory.
When Cross decides that his personal liberty has been tainted to the point of indignation, he decides on a whim to run a grassroots campaign against Garcia, opting to whip up his blindly receptive online-following with slander and back-biting rather than play by the rules. Meanwhile, his widowed mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has gone full QAnon with her voracious ingestion and parroting of online conspiracies, while his clearly-truamatised wife Louise (Emma Stone) is on an anti-paedophile jag with the help of Austin Butler’s tattoo’d rightwing svengali.
This is the basic set-up of the film, and across an admirably light-footed 2 hours and 15 minutes it charts the incremental (but perhaps inevitable) process of American degradation via its to-do list of sacred cow targets. These range from fervent 2nd Amendment champions, small government proponents and shady white supremacists to BLM protesters, White saviour complex types and even Antifa, who in this world are portrayed as an elite, well-funded commando unit posted by private jet to take down specific irritant targets. With Joe’s spiralling, ideologically-driven antics now receiving national coverage, he duly courts the ire of the Antifa enforcers.
Eddington is a deeply cynical film for deeply cynical times, and if you’re looking to find a hero to root for in this fucked-up fresco, then you need to keep on walking. Perhaps the closest we come to a locus for empathy is Micheal Ward’s newly minted police-sergeant Michael, who is trapped between working for a racist, ignorant, self-serving menace, and his white millennial ex-girlfriend who has at the front of BLM protests and wants him to join the as a Black officer who acknowledges the rot in the system.
This avowedly switched-on film is gorgeously shot by the great Darius Khondji and packed to the gills with easter-egg like gags which emphasise how the collective brain-rot that comes from obsessive posting has almost reached Defcon One. The film certainly is rare in actually offering an authentic depiction of social media and its noxious capabilities, even if its insistence on proving there’s no righteous moral that can’t be swiftly liquidated does become a little tiresome by the home stretch. Phoenix, as ever, commits to the bit and then some, and he keeps his gallon-hat sporting tinpot demagogue anchored with enough downhome charm to keep you second-guessing his motives.
I wouldn’t say that Ari Aster has entirely won me over with the full buffet, amuse bouche, entrées, two deserts, cigars, digestifs and petit fours that is Eddington, but the needle is set closer to zero for his next madcap, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink offering slides down the chute.
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