Ari Aster has been one of the hottest new names in the director’s chair following the success of 2018’s Hereditary and 2019’s Midsommar. Following the divisive Beau is Afraid released in 2023 (Martin Scorsese loved it at least), his newest release Eddington has been highly anticipated to see if he can regain his mojo.
Set during the COVID-19 pandemic in May 2020, Sheriff Joe Cross (Jaoquin Phoenix) runs a small, three person department in small-town Eddington, New Mexico and lives with his wife Louise (Emma Stone) and now his conspiracy theorist mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) who has temporarily moved in with the couple. The Crosses have history with Eddington’s mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) which begins to resurface as the pandemic lockdown rules cause the Sheriff and Mayor to bump heads. Sheriff Cross eventually decides to run for Mayor, but his history with Ted and the murder of George Floyd make things begin to spiral out of control.
Eddington runs the gamut in terms of its social commentary on and examination of the world during and after the COVID-19 pandemic that kicked off the 2020s. From the lockdown rules to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the protests following the murder of George Floyd, and subsequent rioting in cities throughout the US, every aspect of that time is depicted onscreen. As all of this social change slowly develops, lurking in the background throughout is the ever present reality of social media on our smartphones, driving the thought processes of the characters and influencing their behavior, first in subtle ways and then becoming more overt as the technology intersects with and accentuates what is happening in society. This particular thread is what serves as the film’s main theme of the modern process of radicalization, particularly for those who are emotionally vulnerable. The three characters whose stories examine this phenomenon are of course Sheriff Cross as the main protagonist, his wife Louise, and local kid Brian played by Cameron Mann. All three fall down the Facebook/Instagram/YouTube/Internet forum rabbit hole for their own reasons; the Sheriff struggling to deal with the rigid COVID rules and his wife’s mental state, Louise dealing with her past trauma and her mother’s mental state, and Brian dealing with his loneliness and lack of female attention. As each latches onto radical politics in an effort to address these things, they fall down the rabbit hole and become more extreme, changing who they are fundamentally in differing ways. It makes for interesting satire in the first half of the film with Eddington operating as an examination on a time period that changed the world substantially and whose consequences we are still dealing with and beginning to understand.
It also is part of what makes Eddington a confusing and ultimately frustrating watch as it could have been intriguing first cinematic foray in commenting on our current moment and what ails our society and has led to the violent radicalization of millions across the political spectrum, but instead devolves into a self-indulgent Ari Aster bizarro mess. The film goes off the rails during its second act when the violence begins and only gets increasingly weird which isn’t helped by a story that, up until that point, felt slightly plodding and little overstuffed. As described above, Eddington attempts to cover a lot of ground within one story and at times you feel it as its characters each cover one aspect of pandemic-era America with only so much time to flesh out each issue. Still, it could have been done effectively were different choices made before the film ventured off toward a story of a shadowy version of Antifa going to war with a Sheriff gone off the rails. The sudden tonal shift coming after an undercooked satire that is never expounded upon equals a film that never feels like it fully establishes itself enough to satisfy. This is a film with a lot to say, it just says it poorly. Which is a shame considering its potential.
Image: A24
