By Jake Wilson
EDDINGTON ★★★½
(MA) 150 minutes
Ari Aster may still be best known as a horror filmmaker, but by now it’s clear his real bent is for satire, to whatever degree there’s a difference. Eddington, his fourth feature as writer-director, launches his kindred spirit Joaquin Phoenix on another odyssey through a nightmare America, following their earlier collaboration Beau Is Afraid.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico, whose commitment to upholding the law is tested by COVID directives.
The difference is that where the hapless Beau stayed trapped in his head, Eddington aims to capture something of the collective reality Americans have been living through over the last few years, or at least the reflection of that reality in the distorted mirror of social media.
We’re in May 2020, with the pandemic well under way, with the summer of Black Lives Matter in the immediate future and the January 6 riots on the horizon. But only a portion of this impinges directly on the isolated town of Eddington, New Mexico, where the stalwart local sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) insists the virus has yet to spread.
Joaquin Phoenix (left) and Pedro Pascal face off in Eddington.
Visually, Eddington is every inch a Western, the desert vistas offering the same scope for deep-focus staging as the grassy plains surrounding the Swedish commune in Aster’s Midsommar. The gag is the contrast with the small screens the terminally online characters keep peering at, implying that the American ideal of rugged self-reliance may have reached its use-by date.
Still, Joe wears a white 10-gallon hat along with his faintly emasculating glasses, and confronts the town’s smooth-talking Hispanic mayor (Pedro Pascal) in the middle of main street as if anticipating a showdown at high noon.
One immediate issue is the demand that citizens mask up, which Joe, as an asthmatic, has more reason to resist than most.
As this implies, he isn’t John Wayne or Gary Cooper, nor is he trying to be. Initially, he’s more of a sympathetic everyman than many Phoenix characters, weighed down by middle-aged frailties but battling to hold it together.
Aside from the challenges of his job, he has plenty to deal with at home, in between his mentally unstable wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her paranoid mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connor), who subscribes to a cult along Q-Anon lines.
Cults are nothing new for Aster, nor dysfunctional families, nor the sense that consensus reality is at best a fragile illusion. But linking these obsessions so directly to current events puts them in a different light, especially when Dawn’s youthful guru (Austin Butler, ideally cast) shows up in person to recount his escape from a network of abusers.
Elsewhere, too, the centre cannot hold. Indeed, by the climax everything appears to be coming apart: Joe’s psyche, Eddington as a community, and indeed the internal logic of Aster’s script, which incorporates an election campaign, a murder investigation, some ominous foreshadowing of the rise of AI, and a grassroots Antifa movement spearheaded by local teenagers.
It’s a lot to process, or it would be if many of the jokes weren’t familiar to the point of staleness, such as the way the callow young activists ritually denounce their “privilege”. That said, excess and caricature are essential to this kind of satire, which attempts to show an entire nation in microcosm while heaping mockery on all sides.
Emma Stone is Louise, Joe’s estranged wife.
The further we spiral into nightmare, the harder it becomes to believe justice will be served, or even know what that would look like. On one level, this is Aster amusing himself in his usual fashion, treating recent history as one big sick joke.
But it could also be understood as saying that the demand for heroes is part of the problem – both within the fiction, and in whatever we choose to call the real world.
Eddington is released in cinemas on August 21.
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