You remember 2020. I remember 2020. Eddington writer-director Ari Aster clearly remembers 2020, and his new film does a comprehensive job of capturing the madness of the moment and suggesting the madness yet to come. All the hallmarks are there: mask mandates, social distancing, the George Floyd demonstrations, online conspiracies, etc. Enough to make one say, Yes, I recognize this world and it is ours. But, let’s rephrase the premise.
You know what you think and feel about everything that happened in 2020. I know what I think and feel about everything that happened in 2020. However, based on Eddington, what Aster thinks and feels about everything that happened in 2020 – and everything he chooses to depict in his film – remains a mystery. And, that’s a shame.
The film is not so much a story as an experience, but what little plot there is revolves around Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his decision to run for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Already, the name Sheriff Joe should put one in mind of former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the Arizona “lawman” and politician who perfectly presaged the Trump era. As multiple characters in the film would tell you, this is not a coincidence.
Sheriff Joe has a wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who each get sucked into their respective conspiracy wormholes. Mayor Ted has a teenage son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who won’t abide by the lockdown rules. Eric has a friend, Brian (Cameron Mann), the Bernie Bro type who slides so far to the left that he ends up on the right. Austin Butler’s in there, too, as a grifter guru on the periphery of the story. And, there are another half-dozen odd characters who populate the world but mostly feel more like devices than people.
Phoenix is excellent because he is always excellent, here playing a man who can’t seem to understand the direction the world is going but nevertheless is, himself, helping to push it that direction. Sheriff Joe is despicable, he is unquestionably part of the problem, but you almost feel bad for him when he pleads that “one-third of the police department is black” with the handful of Black Lives Matter protestors who gather to mildly inconvenience traffic on a single street in town. It’s not a world he recognizes anymore.
A key question in analyzing Eddington is how much sympathy we are meant to extend to Sheriff Joe or, really, any of the characters, who all act in deplorable ways all their own. By centering the Phoenix character and telling 90 percent of the story through his point of view, Aster does seem to be asking the audience, if not to be on his side, then at least to understand why his side might feel the way it does. It’s as if Aster is saying, ‘Hey, didn’t we all lose our minds there a little bit, and isn’t the new normal pretty strange?’
It’s a gamble, and one I don’t think pays off. It forces the film into a wishy-washy, centrist view of one of the most polarizing times in modern U.S. history. It lacks either spirit or spine, and in being everything to everyone, it ends up meaning nothing to anyone.
I saw the film with, what I have to assume was, a largely liberal audience that smugly laughed at the dumb sheriff who wouldn’t wear a mask and printed up campaign materials with silly typos. It then seemed shocked and appalled by the brutality of the violence in the film’s final act. No minds changed there. But, I can also imagine the conservative audience siding with Sheriff Joe and believing that when the world is falling apart, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Good guy with a gun and all that.
If Aster is attempting to lampoon us all as a way of bringing us together in the middle, he fails. The movie isn’t deft enough to make anyone seriously reconsider a position or discover some new insight into The Way Things Are. As I said at the top, we were there. We remember. We know what we think and feel. It’s Aster who still seems to be figuring out where he stands, which is fair enough, but asking us all to sit through a 2 ½-hour movie about it might be a bridge too far.
Aster fascinates me as a filmmaker. I quite like Hereditary and find it a winning entry in the now overpopulated subgenre of horror films about capital-T Trauma. His sophomore feature, Midsommar, is absolutely brilliant, one of my favorite films of the past 10 years. Which is why his followup, Beau Is Afraid, left me feeling so betrayed.
Now, it is self-evidently absurd to feel “betrayed” by an artist who owes me nothing, except possibly my three hours back. But, a funny thing happens when you love a filmmaker’s work: You tend to give them a lot of latitude. It’s why being a fan of a filmmaker or band or whatever else can feel so culty. There are those kinds of fans for whom the object of their affection can do no wrong. These are the “Well, actually” folks who would try to tell us the bad thing is good for … reasons.
It is best not to be that way, but when a filmmaker earns my trust, I tend to give the benefit of the doubt. And, so I did for 150 minutes of Beau Is Afraid’s interminable 179-minute runtime. I truly believed Aster was taking me on a journey and would land the plane. Then, it crashed in the most miserable of ways.
I share all of this because it meant I went into Eddington with skepticism that Aster could take on a subject as grand as the COVID-19 pandemic and wrangle it into a richly textured narrative with thematic depth and emotional resonance. Now, having seen the film, that skepticism feels warranted. There are so many threads that lead nowhere, characters hung out to dry, and provocations in place of ideas. I wanted better. Aster is capable of better. He’s proven that before. On the next one, he might have to prove it again.
