Perhaps Lars von Trier could have made this script work.
On one side of writer-director Ari Aster’s Eddington, you have Joaquin Phoenix in sniveling daddy mode as a sheriff unable to handle the stresses of the beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other is Pedro Pascal as a mayor in the pocket of tech exploiters. Plague-related stress and punishing New Mexico heat have been amping up the pressure, and several cultural flashpoints loom.
In May of this year, I got text messages from two different colleagues at the Cannes Film Festival warning me to prepare before I saw this one after the whole deal with last year’s Civil War, which was the first film I walked out of since Annie Ross’ robotransformation in Superman III sent 7-year-old me dragging my dad to the exit. These colleagues were right to do so — not because Eddington actually has something to say, but because it is impossible for art to “both sides” its way to profundity.
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The film places itself at a disadvantage from the beginning, because it wants to depict a no-holds-barred battle between American ideologies, but to do so requires an utterly fictional space where there actually is the kind of organized left-wing violence that delusional minds insist exists. There’s also a nomadic unhoused person who pops up intermittently, existing only to incarnate paranoia for the unimaginative. It’s one of the two times the film actually skews offensive, but more because of how gratuitous these interludes seem — again more of an abstraction than addressing anything concrete. There really should be a term for when a work of art desperately wants to have something to say about racism, but instead puts its foot in a mess and doesn’t ultimately say anything coherent.
When Eddington starts relitigating the battles over masking, I could feel the bile rise. That’s because it’s not really about exploring ideas — it’s about how annoying masking is for otherwise decent folks, and how everyone who believes in masking is doing so in a weaponized fashion — and the actual health aspect is incidental, and it feels like another example of avoiding taking a side and calling that drama rather than tragedy. Internet paranoia and phone addiction feed these situations, as does just wanting to feel some kind of control over anything. (Which is, honestly, one of the reasons why so much of Eddington feels so wrongheaded. Masking is actually taking personal control of public health, while the ostentatious refusal to do so is whiny and dangerous. But no film as enamored of not actually making a statement as this one would even consider exploring that perspective.)
Everyone in this film who believes in actually trying to improve society is portrayed as a dupe or opportunist or virtue signaler, but the film’s objectively psychotic and actually opportunistic characters are portrayed as regular folks buffeted by society into an untenable situation. It’s the lingering “sincere belief and giving a shit is stupid” mentality that’s plagued society for the past couple of decades, and this film is much more interested in that contagion than COVID-19. When Eddington occasionally clicks, there’s a palpable, inexorable pull that draws you along in a way that feels like your own idea, so in that respect it really does capture the way that doomscrolling has become a dominant means of absorbing information. There’s a subtler, quieter film being held hostage in all the conflagration that really wants to get at how we’ve been transformed by the immediacy of The Now and have incorporated our phones into the structure of our brains.
If you wade through the misplaced anger and hemming and hawing, there is one concrete aspect of the film steeped in righteous fury that rings true, and it’s concerned with how easy it is to snare people in hypothetical concern for abstract children even as they ignore the horrors in their own houses. It’s why you keep seeing the people who yell “groomer” in public forums being arrested for the crimes they project onto others, and it’s the only time that it feels like Eddington has something real to diagnose in society. This is when Emma Stone steps up and wipes the floor with the rest of the cast. It’s a tiny wisp of a part, and she’s the only aspect that lingers in any genuine way.
The film is dishonest at its heart — neither an objective portrayal of complex human people nor the kind of stylized, mean satire that it feels like it really wants to be. At its heart, this is about two insecure men and their escalating conflict, with the added spice of A Woman in Common. That’s a pretty basic plot foundation, and one that’s been part of narratives since the beginnings of storytelling, and it’s where Aster and his cast are on their strongest footing. His three previous features (Beau Is Afraid, Midsommar and Hereditary) have all been exceptional, so perhaps it was inevitable that he would drop the cake tray in such a haphazard fashion. (But also, he Donnie Darko’d himself with the director’s cut of Midsommar, which wrecked the whole tonal balance and made each character exponentially less effective.)
Phoenix’s Sheriff Joe Cross could be a captivating subject, especially in a film that was actually interested in who he is and how he got there, or how the general Eddington populace feels about him. But instead he’s a cipher — a spontaneous and perceptive opportunist in some scenes, a helpless pawn in others, and squirrelly and exhausting in pretty much every scene. That’s not to say that Pascal’s Mayor Garcia is in any better sort of narrative shape, but he seems consistent and understandable (and not borderline psychotic from the beginning), and most importantly, his exhaustion with Cross is relatable to anyone who’s been watching the movie.
There were a lot of people who bagged on Beau Is Afraid for its weird shifts and unexpected turns, but that film felt like something summoned from the most personal of anxieties and fears. Eddington feels like something done with a script about escalating dude insecurities that had an AI summary of the past three years and change grafted on with the theory that the scale and scope of it would keep onlookers from noticing how ramshackle the whole effort reads.
