Eddington
Ari Aster seeks illumination through misanthropy, but the center doesn't hold.
Early in Eddington, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) faces off against incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) on the street outside the sheriff’s office. The two approach each other in a shot framed like a showdown in a Western: camera low and behind Cross as he first catches sight of Garcia across the street. As the two approach each other, a scrap of trash blows in the wind between them, as if even the tumbleweeds have called in sick that day. It’s late May in 2020, and tensions are high. This being an Ari Aster movie, when things come to a head, the situation won’t just get ugly. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and it will be both violent and embarrassing for everyone involved.
Eddington is a fictional town in New Mexico, a nod to John Ford’s classic Westerns before it, many of which were set in Texas or Oklahoma but which were shot against the sweeping backdrops of Arizona and Colorado. Aster’s movie takes his ongoing preoccupation with a distinctly American psychosis of selfishness and places it against the mythic vistas of the American West. Eddington is an exploration of the stories we tell ourselves about our own insecurities—a natural extension of the belief that each of us is the main character in his or her own story—and the harm, physical and intellectual, that comes with that attitude.
At the moment of their meeting, Sheriff Cross has just thrown his proverbial hat into the ring in the race for mayor against Garcia. Both men are in fraught positions. Garcia is at the delicate crossroads that American incumbent politicians face when they’re up for reelection: he has to prove he’s done enough for the community that they’ll vote for him again without giving them enough reason to go digging around in his sordid past—or his motivations for rushing through the legislation necessary to build a deep-learning data center on the edge of town. For his own part, Cross’s candidacy is built on a platform of what he’s against, rather than what he’s for. Phoenix plays Cross as a desperate man hoping for some form of relevancy and control over his life; he is eager for validation and has a copy of the self-help book The Secret, which claims that visualization is the key to attaining your goals, in his glovebox. He’s mostly running his own campaign against being shamed for not wearing a face mask in public.
Aster has demonstrated a knack for the grotesque in his previous films. Here, that quality is primarily on display in the ugliness of the town’s citizens as they talk past each other, unable to see beyond themselves and understand their neighbors. This would be a striking contrast if it didn’t feel like a litany of both-sides observations on the part of the movie. Eddington could be a decent portrait of the loudest people online giving in to their worst tendencies, designed to piss off as many parts of the political spectrum as possible, except that Aster never knows when to throttle back. As it stands, most of the confrontations come across as cartoonish.
By its midpoint, the film has begun to feel like a petri dish of all the bad-faith social media posts from the summer of 2020, when tensions from the Black Lives Matter protests and the presidential election boiled over into people's everyday lives. Aster's setting and characters seem to shift depending on the polemical needs of the scene. The sheriff's department is full of ordinary men simply doing their jobs until they suddenly become venal backstabbers afraid of their own shadows; the teenagers who spearhead the town's protests are histrionic, unable to shut up as they list all the reasons why they are the last people in the world who should have an opinion about current events. The film offers no hope for subtlety or nuance. With the exception of Cross, characters remain caricatures, their worst traits blooming overnight like the desert after a rain.
The movie is about the capacity for harm that rests in every human being, no matter their beliefs. Sometimes the juxtaposition is funny. Austin Butler, who plays a con-man spiritual leader, seems to relish the word salad of his character’s lines. But for a satire about characters unable to see past themselves to the others around them, Eddington is unable to draw any lasting characterizations beyond its protagonist’s point of view.
Worst of all is the film’s use of disability as a punchline and a storytelling device. In every single one of his movies, Aster leans on images of the physically disabled as a shorthand for the uncanny and uncontrollable, a storytelling device intended to push the audience back on their heels with unease. Eddington opens with an unhoused man, ranting as he descends down a mountain toward “more wicked boxes” (by which he means the houses in the town), the proverbial beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born—or perhaps to die an ugly death. He appears repeatedly but is never anything more than a plot device. He is someone to fear, more a force of nature than a human being. Much later in the film, another character finds himself in a wheelchair because of a grievous injury, unable to care for himself. His helplessness is a punchline, an ironic twist on his previous self-sufficiency, a punishment for his actions, and a form of (mostly) self-inflicted infantilization. Aster’s movie is simply a presentation of the grotesque as something to point and laugh at, a thought experiment that condenses the wide world into something small and cheap.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Eddington is in theaters now.