Eddington Review: Ari Aster Struggles to Wrap His Arms Around American Collapse

Most folks do not want to remember the COVID-19 pandemic. Even when we were living through it, snapshot films from filmmakers as varied as Steven Knight and Judd Apatow were roundly rejected by streaming audiences, who could neither laugh at the absurdities of that moment or bask in paeans to essential workers (workers who, we might add, just had their health benefits targeted again by congressional leaders that were calling them indispensable a few years ago). Most folks just simply do not want to go there.

But Ari Aster isn’t most folks. He is a filmmaker with a merciless and unblinking eye, and he’s used it time and again to submerge audiences into pits of bottomless anxiety and despair. When it comes to the things that can keep us lying awake, sleepless and despondent at night, his mind retains everything, like a pandemic hoarder with their stockpiles of toilet paper and Purell. And half a decade after the fact, the guy who made the most brutal metaphor for grief I ever saw in a movie house, is willing to share the notes he took during a period of mass social grieving. The traumatic fallout is still so bitter that the director told the audience I saw the film with, that it ignited “a hell we’re still in.”

Functionally, Aster’s fourth feature is not a horror movie like Hereditary or Midsommar. It’s even vaguely intended to resemble a Western, as indicated by Joaquin Phoenix’s big floppy cowboy hat. But in effect, the film is a political satire so suffused with shrieking despair and terror for what the U.S. became under an N95 mask that it’s scarier than any chiller I’ve recently seen; it’s also a lot more tonally slippery and ambitious than its initially straightforward setup suggests—to the point where it finally slips under its own pretensions.

On the surface, Eddington at first seems a both-sides critique of the excesses perpetrated by all political persuasions, tribes, and stripes during the year of lockdown. This is most obviously epitomized by the central conflict between Joe Cross (Phoenix), the local sheriff in the small New Mexico town of Eddington, and Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), the mayor of this community who is a firm believer in the still-emerging COVID science. During an early scene of the film, the asthmatic Joe walks into a grocery store where anyone who does not wear a mask is cast out like a leper. As an asthmatic, however, Joe is unable to wear a mask for long periods of time, and as a sheriff he feels entitled to ignore anyone’s pleas to do so—until the mayor himself asks Joe to leave.

From the offset, one might imagine the film is taking a “pox on both your houses” approach since the film reveals a genuine level of sympathy for Phoenix’s central, put-upon white man who at first must roll with the punches of the town’s patronizing political establishment while also watching his troubled wife Louise (Emma Stone) and sheltering-in-place mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), fall for QAnon conspiracy theories online.

Meanwhile in the streets, he and his Black deputy Michael (Michael Ward) are accused of perpetuating the sins of whiteness on stolen land by local high schoolers who are rightfully outraged by the murder of George Floyd. So with nothing else to do in lockdown, they’re protesting in the center town where windows lay broken. It’s a bad situation made worse by the other, white deputy (Luke Grimes), who just wants to break their heads in between suspicious glances at Michael and insistent queries on if he’s “good” after Floyd’s murder.

Eddington is a cauldron of all the half-remembered or repressed inflection points and tensions of 2020, with each clinically and sometimes lovingly set atop a tableau during the film’s first act. But a filmmaker as misanthropic and mischievous as Aster is not just out to hold a mirror up, or force you to remember that time you did a drive-thru COVID test; he wishes to distort this memory and draw a line between it and the current sensation we all, in one way or another, are feeling today: that the entire world is shattering one obscene tweet at a time and the center will not hold.

When Aster’s film works best, it is quietly marking the ironies of 2020 and our modern bellicose lifestyle. By virtue of making the film with some degree of hindsight, it is easier now to concede when just about every character might eventually make a fair point, even if it’s often with the precision of a broken clock; there is perhaps more empathy offered to a wheezing Phoenix being bullied out of a grocery store than A24’s target audience, and Aster’s biggest fans, were likely to admit five years ago; and even the CIA has publicly acknowledged the pandemic probably started out of a virology lab in Wuhan.

Nonetheless, the depths of depravity that are discovered by Phoenix and Aster’s gun-toting Alice in his online rabbit hole are never actually justified. Aster knows how to earn a big audience laugh every time he features a white teenager screaming into a microphone that “I shouldn’t be talking right now, BUT…,” yet one side is still carrying most of the guns, and in some cases appear vulnerable to heinous manipulation. Take Stone’s brittle and unhappy housewife who becomes enamored with a charismatic and brazenly opportunistic cult leader (Austin Butler) when he peddles incredulous stories of pedophile rings and The Most Dangerous Game style hunting parties in 1990s D.C.

If one squints, the epic self-portrait of a failing society Aster strives for is sketched in; and it’s a portrait of a culture gathered around a table served by a buffet of endless acrimony and recrimination. Everyone has a kernel of the truth on their plate, but it’s obfuscated from their neighbor. The bigger picture, though, amounts to a mass-delusional screed where we’re collectively Travis Bickle before the third act of Taxi Driver—mind you only an actual Travis-like character has got the firearms.

Eddington flirts with becoming that movie, and maybe for long stretches is that movie. But it’s also determined to chase every squirrel, half-formed idea, or muse to ground. It’s a circuitous exercise and finally a frustrating one, as the same filmmaker who infamously gave the world the scrotum-monster at the end of Beau Is Afraid descends into pure farce by Eddington’s conclusion.

To be fair, Eddington is a much more cohesive film than Aster’s previous misstep, but it is not necessarily any more satisfying. In its attempt to essay every quirk and eccentricity of an America eating itself, the film becomes gluttonously over-indulgent. It also can never fully wrap its arms around its central antihero, perhaps in part because Phoenix doesn’t seem to have a firm handle on Joe. The usually excellent leading man with a penchant for sad sacks certainly revels in Joe’s frequent bouts of self-pity, but the creation cannot convincingly fit beneath that wide-brimmed hat or into the desert scenery in the way Pascal’s posher mayor can in a single close-up. Like Phoenix’s Napoleon, Joe seems an affectation, a collection of tics and squirrelly insecurities.

It’s a misjudged lead performance that is all the more glaring when opposite the likes of the consistently clutch Stone or even a cameoing Butler, and it is unable to fill the black hole at the center of this story anymore than Aster can fully explain to the film (or the world’s) satisfaction about why this dissolution is possible. In the end, Eddington is a fascinating movie, but an unpleasant and disappointing one. It remembers with more detail than anyone will care for the nightmare that was 2020, but it does not make the flashback worth the trauma. This might not be a horror movie, but perhaps it could have used some demonic cults to spike things up. Otherwise this is an ultimately bitter, poisoned pill with no chaser.

Eddington opens in theaters on Friday, July 18.