Ari Aster's "Eddington" is a deliberately hollow provocation. It sets itself up as a statement about the chaos that unfolded in the summer of 2020, only to conclude that there's no explanation for why so much of humanity collapsed under the weight of conspiracy theories, mask debates, Black Lives Matter protests, and the rise of viral culture. Want to know how we got here? Tough luck. You'll never know. No one will.
It's a challenging film that plays with contentious ideas, including third-rate topics like racial divide, without much meaningful interest to say about it... and yet, I think that's the point. Remember all that anxiety, confusion, division, and mistrust that arose when people were told to stay home from work or wear masks in the supermarket? Aster throws it all in a blender and purees it.
Director: Ari Aster
Writer: Ari Aster
Stars: Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O'Connell, Emma Stone
The result is a film that radically divided critics upon its premiere at Cannes and will undoubtedly do the same when people confront it in theaters this summer. Fascinating debates will ensue around this film, both among those who find its undeniable ambition courageous and those who find its racial provocations utterly irresponsible. I think, in fact, that's how Aster intends it. He's made a film about divided communities, and in his own way, he hopes to do the same for his audience.
This genre-hopping film always returns to its roots as a contemporary Western. A man with a name John Wayne would have approved of, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is the world-weary sheriff of the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, population 2,634. It feels like a place on the brink of conflict before 2020 toppled the dominoes. Aster treats that year's chaos as the Man in Black of his genre: the outsider who came to town and stirred up the locals at the bar.
In this case, the bar is owned by Mayor Ted Garcia (an effective Pedro Pascal), who has a contentious past with Cross and an increasingly stormy present. Garcia's history with Joe's wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), only heightens the tension that arises when the two men find themselves on opposite sides of the mask debate. Things really kick off at a supermarket when Joe defends a neighbor being evicted for not wearing a mask. After all, no one in Eddington has contracted COVID yet. And it's hard to breathe in those things!
Soon after, Joe is using the anti-mask movement as a platform to run for mayor, desperately trying to make sense of his troubled life in truly pathetic ways. He posts conspiracy theories in the car he drives around town, which gets increasingly ridiculous (and hilarious). He's one of those guys who grabs at anything that gives him a much-needed victory, one of the many who saw the opportunity to take sides in 2020 as a route to much-needed character definition. It gave the jerks personalities they'd never had before. But politics plays to Joe's worst tendencies, amplifying his desperation and need. Like a firework thrown into a gas station, Joe's increasingly irrational behavior seems destined for violence, and you know the writer-director of "Hereditary," "Midsommar," and "Beau is Afraid" isn't going to pull any punches.
What's he up to? Our response to the pandemic is just the beginning. He begins his film with snippets of ludicrous conspiracy theories about COVID-19, many amplified by Dawn's constant repetition. She prints them out for Louise and Joe and leaves them around the house. Dawn continues the trend in Aster's work of mothers who only fuel their children's (and, in this case, her son-in-law's) anxiety. And Louise begins to slip, drawn to a viral charlatan (Austin Butler) who knows all the buzzwords to enrage people over practically nothing. Butler's role, though underdeveloped, feels like one of the many feints in Aster's script. He constantly goes down the same path—COVID, BLM, politics, viral scammers, etc.—only to take a sharp turn onto another dusty trail in Eddington and encounter yet another person doing something irritatingly stupid and increasingly violent.
Aster's films often have a powerful visual language, and that's the case here, especially with the excellent cinematography by veteran Darius Khondji ("Uncut Gems," "The Immigrant"), which amplifies both the satire and the tension without distracting. Lucian Johnston's editing is equally accomplished, keeping the film long and vibrant from one heated encounter to the next.
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