NATHAN WEINBENDER:
I can’t imagine anyone wanting to relive May 2020, when cabin fever from the pandemic, compounded by a generation’s worth of pent-up rage about police brutality, finally boiled over. Of course that’s when Ari Aster, our foremost purveyor of cinematic anxiety and discomfort, would set his new movie.
Eddington gets its name from a fictional hamlet in New Mexico, which is a microcosm of so many modern American problems. The film’s early scenes contain some extremely specific emblems of that time, not so long ago: 6-foot distance markers on the floor of the grocery store, banners on the sides of buildings decrying Anthony Fauci, social media posts spreading COVID conspiracies, protests about the murder of George Floyd spilling into the streets.
The town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is trying to take it all in stride. He gets why people are mad and confused. But he also doesn’t think any of it is that big of a deal. And he really doesn’t like that Eddington’s liberal mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), would overstep him and enact mask mandates that Cross doesn’t want to follow.
Feeling emasculated, Cross spontaneously decides he’ll run against Garcia in the upcoming election, and he immediately leans into right-wing talking points and covers his cruiser in badly spelled anti-government stickers.
But Eddington is less about these two guys than it is a community—and thereby a society—under duress. We’re introduced to a huge cast of characters: Cross’s deputies, the neighboring tribal police force, the town’s teenagers flirting with political activism, the Facebook svengali (Austin Butler) whose woo-woo philosophies are hypnotizing Cross’s reclusive wife Louise (Emma Stone).
There’s also the specter of the corporate data center being built at the edge of town, the most explicit example of the ways in which its people are being poisoned—economically, intellectually, emotionally. Uncertainty breeds paranoia, and paranoia curdles into fear and hatred and makes us susceptible to exploitation. Cross’s hardline conservatism isn’t his genuine ideology; it’s a kneejerk response to Garcia’s openhearted progressivism, which is itself as performative, Aster seems to be saying, as the radicalized young people taking a knee in the middle of the town square without really understanding why.
There are times when Aster is deliberately exploiting real-world pain for cheap laughs; this is pitch-black satire, but merely painting everyone as the idiot isn’t a particularly sophisticated approach. I don’t think anything Aster is saying is altogether wrong, I just don’t know that it adds up to much.
He’s a natural behind the camera, and there are stretches of filmmaking in Eddington that are bracing and beautiful, particularly in the middle of the movie when it slows down and focuses on Cross’s descent into desperation and violence.
I loved his last film, the overindulgent and equally divisive existential nightmare Beau Is Afraid, so I was disappointed as my distaste for Eddington grew and grew as it unspooled over two and a half hours. There’s a smug cynicism about it that rubbed me the wrong way, and because Aster wants me to be outraged and offended, then haha, I guess the joke’s on me.
My feelings have simmered in the week since I’ve seen Eddington, and I’m willing to concede that it might play differently in 10 or 15 years. I’ve already had a lot of conversations and arguments about it, and I can’t quite shake certain parts of it. Regardless of your feelings, Aster has bottled the uncertainty, hostility and pettiness of our current world. It will make for a fascinating time capsule.
For Spokane Public Radio, I'm Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a co-host of Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.