Eddington

Eddington
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler
Directed by Ari Aster

I got into a discussion with some friends about the new "Superman" movie, and one of my friends felt like it was missing something, where it seemed to want to be more than it was, but held back for some reason. I said it's because it's the first of a supposedly new film universe and they wanted to play it safe, bringing in as many butts in the seats as possible to propel this new universe and make it successful financially. On its face that's not necessarily a bad thing, as the movie itself was still really good, but it shows something that's happening in Hollywood - artists are foregoing their message in favor of the masses, trying to appease as many people as possible to make the fabled "Billion Dollar Club." It also happened in "Jurassic World: Rebirth" with the addition of the family that only slogs the story but also introduces a little girl and a baby dinosaur that has sold a lot of toys in the back end, again focusing more on profit than personality. Then you get someone like Ari Aster. He doesn't care about making billions or pleasing everyone, but rather creates art for art's sake, no matter how divisive and unpopular that might be. "Eddington," his fourth film, is easily his most polarizing film to date, but also one of his most important in the modern zeitgeist.

In the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, in 2020, the town is overrun with COVID worries as the town's left-leaning mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), has implemented a mask mandate. This enrages the more right-leaning town sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who doesn't believe in wearing masks, leading to a heated confrontation between the two men. Joe, eager for his voice to be heard, recklessly announces his own run for mayor, irritating his wife Louise (Emma Stone) and their live-in conspiracy-led mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell). As Joe's bumbling campaign fails to take off, the town is overrun by protestors for Black Lives Matter and the arrival of ANTIFA, and spiraling Joe deeper and deeper into his own conspiratorial hole that threatens his own sanity.

"Eddington," according to Aster himself, is a Western film with black comedy sprinkled throughout, and that's clearly evident from the opening scene forward. This is the Western for the modern era, where mask mandates and rising tensions serve as the proverbial Man in Black who arrives in the Western town to rile up the masses. Joe is the John Wayne of the film - at least in his own mind - who comes against the handlebar-mustache-twirling villain in the Mayor who wants to control everyone, and there's even a scene where Joe and Ted stand on opposite ends of the road with a piece of trash drifting down the street like a modern-day tumbleweed. You're just waiting for the shootout to happen, and when it does, it does so in a way that only Aster can achieve: with sheer insanity and dark hilarity. 

After the film's conclusion I wracked my brain trying to understand it's message, as it seems to skewer both sides of the debate that drove Americans to near-Civil War in the wake of the 2020 pandemic. Where news was scarce and extremists from both sides spewed their unfounded "facts" that served as an echoing chamber for their respective sides. In a way, America was the Wild West of old in that respect, and it's honestly surprising it didn't escalate further than it did. Here, though, we sort of see what would happen if that did occur, with the small town of Eddington serving as ground zero for that event.  Essentially, this movie is about people who want to be heard, and have no clue how to go about doing it.

While it seems that it's a political movie, "Eddington" really is about people's inherent politics and the uneducated way they go about professing them - something that is happening more and more since the 2020 tide. The movie is inundated with cell phone usage as people scroll through their perfectly algorithm talking points, pundits who claim falsehoods as facts and the people believe them. It showed what happened when people were fed up about being in forced lockdown - angry on both ends who stroke their own flames and watch as they quickly escalate to forest-fire pitches.

Joe, portrayed by an enigmatic and unafraid Joaquin Phoenix, is the center of the film and also the town's lit fuse. He is a man who's not very intelligent, and ruled by his emotions rather than logic or reason. He's so against the mask mandates and spited by his enemies that he haphazardly announces a run for mayor, which thrusts his longsuffering wife into the heat of the battle (Emma Stone has a thankless role here, and her story - along with Austin Butler's traveling preacher/cult leader - don't really have their own room to breathe), resulting in him losing his grip on reality. He spews lies that threatens his marriage, sinks into a dissociative state, and is consumed by the media and events of the world around him with no way to handle them. It's the perfect personification of how Americans as a whole felt during that tumultuous year, and how it's shaped everything going forward.

His arch nemesis is Pedro Pascal's mayor Ted Garcia, who - by all accounts - is just a good guy trying to do what's best for his people by mandating masks and quarantine. Yet not even he is off the hook, as he plans to open a major data center in town that is reminiscent - and still is - of government's eye over our society. While Joe wants to attack him, he struggles because Ted isn't white, and that's another subtext Aster infuses into this movie - protests for Black Lives Matter that invade the town (well, sort of, as the protest only had about twenty people). It was darkly humorous to see all-white protestors accepting their own white privilege and hating themselves for it at the same time (and also showcasing how inept some protestors were at their message, as one girl being interviewed after a crime talks about her seemingly-volatile posts weren't what she really meant). 

While the movie is darkly humorous (honestly, there's numerous scenes where my friends and I were laughing out loud), it doesn't pick one side over another, but rather shows how both are flawed. It also focuses on how we consume our news that we want to hear, and how we express it. Everyone knows something is wrong, but the information they consume is conflicting and confusing so no one knows where to aim their anger at, so they turn on one another. Despite being a community, Eddington is anything but - it's a match waiting for the fuse, with Joe serving as that fuse.

Although it starts off slow, "Eddington" escalates quickly around the halfway point where you can't help but feel like a snowball at the top of the mountain that tumbles down the mountain quickly gaining momentum and size but incapable of stopping. Joe is that snowball, and it's sheer insanity what happens thanks to his decisions and machinations. It's Ari Aster at his finest, unashamed to write and direct something he knows will divide audiences rather than giving a good hit of Dopamine with no real substance behind it.

The Score: A+