Eddington is yet another disappointment from A24 darling director Ari Aster, a faux-cerebral meditation on the politics and cultural impact of the pandemic, stuffed with character sketches, and focalized interactions, which tumbles into a delirious third act twist, and a typically uninspired end sequence. Spoilers.
The reception of this movie on the festival circuit brought a divisive combination of boos and standing applause. Eddington is Ari Aster’s take on the cultural hypocrisies and blindspots that led liberals to lose the culture war, ever upstream of the political battles being fought, but it’s not entirely clear what point he is making. For instance, in the opening sequence after an insane homeless guy wanders into town, we see Sheriff Joe Cross (ugh, average, ugh, Cross) chastised by the covid-conscious police of the bordering town of Pueblo for not wearing his mask while he’s sitting alone in his own vehicle, putting on display the absolutely weird and non-scientific hand-wringing of liberals in the early period of the pandemic, when dogma and scientific paternalism cloaked as common sense morals empowered everyday liberals to punish the more skeptically-minded and common sense folksy observations of the good (conservative) people of Eddington in cruel and unusual ways. Joaquin Phoenix’s Cross is absolutely perfect for projecting this mix of skepticism, common sense, and common decency, as when he criticizes the store clerks for kicking out an elderly man trying to buy groceries for his family but unwilling to wear his mask because “he can’t breathe in it”. Cross reminds everyone in the store that there hasn’t been a single case of covid-19 in the entire county, rendering a lot of their more draconian community pressure to enforce safety measures needless. Meanwhile the liberals in town, including a poorly utilized Pedro Pascal, playing the duplicitous but also fundamentally decent and well-meaning mayor Ted Garcia, spout inappropriately applied nationalized platitudes for regional issues. Cross seems even more deserving of the audience’s sympathy when we learn that his wife is largely checked out, both mentally and emotionally from their marriage, exhausted by her conspiracy-minded mom and her mental illness (unspecified). He only seems supportive and understanding of giving her the space she needs, even asking a work buddy to buy her creepy dolls to help her burgeoning online Etsy-type store. When confronted with anti-government conspiracy theories from his MIL, Cross seems impatient and annoyed, clear-eyed in the practical things that government and civil service can do for people, as demonstrated by the swift reversal in the bar scene, when he’s forced to get his hands dirty in removing a vagrant from the bar after being criticized for not wearing his mask or questioning why he’s been called for a petty disturbance.
It takes time for the film to reveal the ways in which Cross’s blithe optimistic run for mayor and his swift embrace of fringey conspiracy talking points hurts his loved ones and puts them in awkward positions, not just his wife, whose past he drags through the mud despite his peppy requests to talk it over and decide on his future actions “as a team.” This all comes to a head when his estrangement from his wife in a weirdly stereotypical manic episode leads him to try to reassert himself through the murder of the vagrant, followed by the shocking assassination of Garcia and his family, and the bumbling coverup the following day with the ever watchful Butterfly. Garcia is peevish, weirdly corrupted by a crypto data center called goldenmagicarp though in the politics of the pandemic that heterodoxy in his social-financial politics doesn’t seem as apparent as it does in the final act, when it’s revealed that the New World Order and its shadowy puppet masters have dispatched strike teams to commence with a violent cover-up. This amounts to the WTF A24 twist designed to promote “Discourse” online and create buzz, but it’s really just the stupid button getting slammed as hard as it possibly can for the third act. And it’s not even that original of a twist.
In a lot of ways this movie reminds me of a film that marketed itself specifically for its conspiratorial overtones during the start of the pandemic, Hunt. Both kind of use vaguely racist conspiracy theories to enact fringe conservative revenge fantasies and in the process satirize those same protagonists who end up being too smart by half. Only, Eddington isn’t really about the pandemic so much as it’s a background like a moonbase or the 40s. The fact that some of the actors doesn’t seem so much related to their political leanings as it has to do with how hard it is to sympathize or even understand someone wearing a mask on camera. The film doesn’t seem to be able to afford Pedro Pascal for more than the first half of the movie. The third act leans hard into the antifa conspo stuff while another lazy twist at the very end uses disability as a form of punishment for a character, which is pretty in line with Ari Aster’s general feelings about disability in his tentpole films. Emily Stone’s arc is a parody of mental illness, so much so that it’s hard to tell if anyone has thought too hard about her agency at all or if she’s more of a strawman made of human flesh. Austin Butler’s performance is kind of amazing, but he’s underutilized, while the Detective Butterfly character’s recurrence is fun everytime he comes along to ruin the best laid plans of our anti-heroes.
If I had to try to wrap my head around what’s going on in the third act, I’d say that the indulgence of the conspiracy theory tries to take an absurd idea to its furthest extent in order to satirize it but also to find a way to externalize the way that the pandemic was a period of self-owning on a massive scale, a multi-layered forgetting of the fact that we are all one community. The unmediated way in which we see Joe Cross do bad things to his wife without any heavy-handed editing show some skill at storytelling, as does the faux-dramatic music behind the “riot,” and the dunking on white young people is fun, but ultimately feels pointless and unresolved.
I’m not sure what Ari Aster’s problem is, but the movie should’ve ended about four times before it actually did and the lack of restraint and thoughtfulness about punching down time and time again shows his cruelty and lack of humanity.
