An Anomie Of The People or Beau Is Infected

My thoughts on Eddington

At the preview screening that I attended for Ari Aster’s Eddington, the lounge adjacent to the theater was offering a specialty cocktail for sale inspired by the feature presentation. I did not indulge—professionalism, you know—but unless said beverage was a mixture of hydrochloric acid and Mountain Dew, I can only presume that it was infinitely easier to swallow than the film it was commemorating. Utilizing an approach that ostensibly plays like a contemporary Western spiked with elements of neo-noir and social satire and enacted by a cast including the likes of Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler, Aster presents viewers with a depiction of the madness of contemporary America and how its long-simmering tensions and fractures finally boiled over during the first months of the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 in ways that are still being felt today. That is a lot, to be sure, but what it doesn’t have, as it turns out, is much of anything in the way of a point or any unique or intriguing thoughts on the subject at hand. The result is a peculiar and rambling misfire that comes across as both overstuffed and undernourished and whose attempts at provocation prove to be more feeble than genuinely outrageous.

Set during May, 2020, a period when the country was still under pandemic lockdown, the film is set in Eddington, New Mexico, a small town of about 2400 people. Among them is Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix), a man who clearly fancies himself as an authentic representation of stoic old-time values and virtues, though the combination of his asthma and the silly hat that he is always wearing—the kind you might normally find on the head of a tourist trying to look authentic—pretty much undercuts that pose at every turn. Although the state has mandated mandatory masking, he refuses to do so—claiming that he cannot breathe with one on—and believes that these mandates have essentially turned Eddington into something akin to a ghost town where neighbors are no longer allowed to be neighborly due to masking, social distancing and all those other pesky things instituted so that people could stay alive.

This puts him into direct conflict with the town’s more ostensibly progressive mayor, Ted Garcia (Pascal), who insists that everyone—including Joe—obey the mandate in the name of public health. There are other points of conflict between the two, such as Garcia’s support for plans to erect a massive data server farm on the outskirts of town that many, including Cross, feel will deplete the natural resources of a town already reeling from the effects of a drought. There is also the fact that before she married Cross, his wife, Louise (Stone), had a brief relationship with Garcia and Cross, fueled by stories fed to him by her mother, Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), a conspiracy theorist who has been riding out the pandemic with them, is convinced that her subsequent emotional troubles can be traced directly to what he allegedly did to her all those years ago. As a result of all of this, Cross suddenly announces that he is going to run for mayor against Garcia in the upcoming election, promising to bring an end to the mandates and the data farm and return things to the way they used to be.

After doing this, much to Louise’s displeasure, an unexpected monkey wrench gets thrown into the works in the form of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis cop and the subsequent rise in Black Lives Matter protests. When a video of an altercation between Cross and a violent homeless man (Clifton Collins Jr.) goes viral, BLM protestors begin to take to the streets of Eddington as well, mostly in the form of local young people who evidently have nothing else to do. One of them is Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who is Garcia’s son, who shot the aforementioned video but whose commitment to the movement is centered mostly around a competition with his friend Brian (Cameron Mann) to win the attentions of hot agitator Sarah (Amelie Hoeferle), who previously dated Cross’s African-American deputy, Mikey (Michael Ward) and who believes that he should be on their side fighting oppression instead of defending it.

Meanwhile—and there are a lot of those on display here—Louise has made the acquaintance of Vernon Jefferson Peak (Butler), an odd-but-charismatic young man who has taken his recovered memories of allegedly being sold by his father into a pedophilic sex-trafficking ring as a child (a story that even Dawn finds a bit hard to swallow) and used them to begin a pseudo-ministry in which he preaches others to discover and come to terms with their own inner pain. Cross isn’t buying much of what he has to say either but with his early campaign stumbles—epitomized by his police car/campaign vehicle featuring a sign reading “Your Being Manipulated”—weighing on him, he tries to exploit Louise’s personal trauma for his own political gain. Shockingly, this does not go well for him but the action does inadvertently prove to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back as it kicks off a series of increasingly violent and bizarre events that threaten to bring down the town even quicker than COVID-19.

Aster, for those unfamiliar with the name, has become the latest cause celebre amongst moviegoers who want to demonstrate just how daring and edgy their cinematic tastes are without having to actually stray outside the confines of the average multiplex. His 2018 debut Hereditary was an unusually gripping and unnerving horror film that contained a number of genuinely nasty shocks and was driven further (perhaps even more so that originally thought) by the intense central performance from Toni Collette. By comparison, the horror epic Midsommar (2019) had a good performance from Florence Pugh and a few creepy bits but was somewhat undone by a narrative that hewed far too closely to the genre classic The Wicker Man (1973) while Beau is Afraid (2023) was a massive exercise in cinematic solipsism that contained a couple of undeniably striking sequences (notably the wildly funny one involving Parker Posey) but which eventually collapsed under the combined weight of its ambitions and pretensions. And yet, even though I flat out hated Beau is Afraid, I nevertheless have a certain admiration for the big swings that Aster was determined to take with it, even if nearly every one of them ended up with him landing on his ass and viewers checking their watches.

Although I suppose I slightly prefer Eddington to Beau is Afraid—though that is due in no small part to the fact that it is a half-hour shorter—it is in many ways a more maddening film in the way that it announces its grand ambition of examining the ways in we as a functioning society essentially snapped in the face of the pandemic and not only fails to live up to it but too often seems to avoid tackling it altogether in anything beyond the most facile of ways. In theory, it feels as if Aster is trying to do his take on the sprawling, state-of-our-collective-soul epics that Robert Altman would occasionally present us with from time to time in which he grappled with sex, violence, politics, community, corruption and whatever other ideas consumed him at the time and did so in ways that were brave, bold and audacious in equal measure. These films ranged in quality from such unquestioned masterpieces as Nashville and Short Cuts to more uneven works like Buffalo Bill and the Indians and HEALTH but even the lesser ones had a point and purpose to them that one could always feel while watching them and which allowed to remain compelling and watchable even as they threatened to go off the rails.

By comparison, while Aster seems to be setting us up for just such a film here with its melange of hot topic issues—racial strife, sexual abuse, protest movements, our response to COVID-19, the more troubling aspects of American history and, inevitably, the Internet and how its ostensible ability to bring people from around the world together has instead allowed them to drift off into rabbit holes where their own prejudices and hatreds have been given a place to flourish and fester, to name just a few—he doesn’t have any real insight to offer on any of the ones that don’t simply get lost in the mix. More frustrating is the way that he basically avoids taking anything that might resemble a stand at any given point so that every single character comes across as some degree of insincere asshole throughout—in his eyes, there is no real difference between the unhinged Cross and his increasingly homicidal actions and Sarah’s determination to embrace the BLM matter despite—ho, ho—being white and privileged. (Of course, Aster realizes that his jokes about the town’s BLM protestors might not be as easy to make if any of them were, you know, Black, so he makes sure that there are none to be seen.) Rather than boldly taking both sides to task for their foibles, Aster engages in an epic round of bothsidesism that is more tedious than edifying and which means that none of the events that transpire have any kind of dramatic or emotional weight to them. At times, the film feels like the world’s longest episode of South Park, a show famous for shooting satirical barbs at anything it comes across while demonstrating precious few commitments of its own, though at least South Park would graciously remember to make some of those barbs funny from time to time. (That “Your Being Manipulated” sign is kind of amusing the first time we see it but grows less so the next twelve or so times.)

Eddington sports a large cast of characters (I haven’t even mentioned the Indigenous sheriff from the town next to Eddington, played by William Belleau, who becomes a bigger presence in the second half when he and Cross butt heads over a crime scene spanning their respective jurisdictions) but other than Cross, Aster doesn’t bother to develop them to serve as anything other than walking punchlines or plot developments. Phoenix is okay, I suppose, but his work here as a schnook being put upon by the increasingly bizarre events surrounding him is essentially a rehash of his work in Beau is Afraid and his deliberately mush-mouthed line readings don’t do his work or the film as a whole any favors. As for the other big names, Pascal has charm but suffers from his character’s lack of development, Stone is pretty much wasted throughout and Butler’s character is so perplexing, arbitrary and unconnected to the proceedings during his brief appearance that he could have been eliminated entirely without making a single bit of difference to the proceedings.

Eddington has just enough things going for it to keep it from being a total loss. The score by Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton helps to establish the kind of quietly unnerving mood that the rest of the film fails to accomplish and the cinematography by the legendary Darius Khondji, while perhaps not a standout in comparison to his output, is often striking. Although it goes on too long and ultimately doesn’t add up to much in the end, the extended climactic set-piece involving Cross racing through the dark and not-completely-deserted streets of his town is well-staged. There are even a couple of moments here and there where Aster’s satirical barbs actually hit there targets. And yet, for all of its ambitions to be seen as a true cinematic testament of our times, Eddington is an ultimately dreary, vapid and unfocused mess whose sense of self-importance ends up writing a check that it cannot possibly begin to cover. Watching Aster’s increasingly flailing attempts to take our country’s temperature—via rectal thermometer, of course—all I could think of was Rodney Dangerfield’s immortal quote in Back to School after seeing history professor Sam Kinison go off on an unhinged tirade: “He really seems to care. About what, I have no idea.”

Now for that drink. . .