Review: Eddington

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Director:  Ari Aster

Stars:  Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Deirdre O’Connell

As his acclaimed first two efforts were horror films, lets put Ari Aster’s current phase into a horror context; he’s presently in Exorcism Mode. 2023’s repellent manbaby odyssey Beau is Afraid certainly changed the set of expectations around him, resetting the board. But it also seemed to show Aster evacuating all manner of neuroses and psychological torments. Cathartic for him? Maybe. For us? Jury’s out.

If Beau is Afraid was an interior film, Eddington is an exterior one, turning the attention outward. Set in 2020 as lockdown mandates sweep the USA in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, what unfurls here has the feel of Aster’s very own State of the Union doomscroll. The prevalence and power of social media to culture and sway public opinion is of key concern but, as he scrolls, Aster snares as many push-button zeitgeisty topics as he can muster, everything from the Black Lives Matter movement to Jeffrey Epstein. It’s certainly an ambitious effort to reflect back America’s embarrassingly-public decline. It also makes for wildly unfocused yet eminently fascinating work.

In the titular one horse New Mexico town, a pissing contest has begun. Asthmatic sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) begrudges wearing a facemask, and feels under the thumb of friendly mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Cross starts vectoring a number of his frustrations – including tensions at home – toward Garcia, starting up a two-bit attempt to challenge his re-election out of his sheriff’s station. Cross’ overwhelmingly negative campaign stirs up a hornet’s nest, while his two ineffectual deputies, Guy Tooley (Luke Grimes) and Michael Cooke (Micheal Ward), struggle to stop mounting public outcry at the death of George Floyd. There’s also the contentious bid to site an AI data farm nearby, and the spectral presence of far-right cult-leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) to reckon with, not to mention which of a couple of kids score with a local girl who has a roster of protests to get to.

Eddington spins a lot of plates and it does so at length. Ultimately, it is Sheriff Cross who the film follows, so it is his oft-improvised approach to… well, everything… that we’re asked to examine. It seems as though Aster is charting the course from reluctant everyman to radicalised nutjob via Phoenix, but the journey isn’t quite this simple. Cross’ thorny home life with his traumatised, impressionable wife Louise (Emma Stone) is it’s own fraught battleground, especially with his extremely-online conspiracy theorist mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) providing omnipresent stress. Still, it’s worth noting that Aster prioritises another Phoenix character study here, so actors like Pascal, Stone and Butler are occasional guests in the picture, orbiting rather than anchoring. Through Sheriff Cross we’re asked to contemplate how much environment and circumstance factor in the galvanising of a man’s politics. As well as how keenly social media stokes a this-or-that binary mentality.

It can be wearisome. While Aster presents all of this as a self-satisfied satirical sideswipe, it does amount to 90-or-so minutes of people yelling at each other before Eddington abruptly switches genres so that it’s director can tries his hand at the cool neo-western. The Coens loom large as Eddington narrows its focus and immediately becomes more engaging. Aster mixes their penchant for idiots wearing badges with, well, No Country for Old Men. And in the middle of it all is Sheriff Cross trying to focus as the noise perpetuates around him. Keen to keep an audience on their toes, the film’s gun-toting showdown is followed by a deliberately bewildering and frustrating coda. A final fuck-you to anyone who thought they were getting out of this with a decent set of answers.

It’s tempting when thinking about Eddington to compare it to other ambitious follies. Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales particularly springs to mind for its keenness to expel back at us all the crude pop culture tics that manifested in the wake of 9/11. Eddington feels like a similarly too-soon attempt to compress a nation under stress into a single, sweeping statement. The country’s too vast, the targets too complex. Aster’s efforts seem slightly more considered, and there’s something admirable in the absurd attempt to make pop cinema into something else – something deliberately contentious and engaging – but it’ll rattle and enrage as many people as it charms (I clocked walkouts).

But it’s hard to deny that Aster has the stuff, especially when he turns his plaything into an all-out genre exercise. The Coens are evoked, but there’s also the pared down, focused suspense of Hitchcock in Eddington‘s prowling and desperate nighttime showdown. If Hitchcock had access to gigantic modern assault weapons, that is.

Aster has created an elephant here; something different to all who approach it. One person will grasp a politically inclined cringe-comedy, another will feel the edges of an ill-thought-out thesis on American territorialism and so on. Much as Eddington continues Aster’s inclinations to risible excess and indulgence, it’s at least asking for audience engagement, which is more than was felt through Beau is Afraid. That Aster has turned back to face us makes this, at the very least, a step in a friendlier direction. This outpouring is nakedly messy, indicative of a restless, over-busy mind. For the time being Aster has secured the privilege of a studio platform for his outpourings. We might not like everything that ejects out of him, but his acts of exorcism are, in themselves, inherently watchable.