Following on from the divisive sprawl of Beau Is Afraid, Eddington is Ari Aster’s most ambitious swing yet: a political satire, pandemic chronicle and western-themed psychodrama all funnelled into a film that never quite justifies its 149-minute bloat.
The focused supernatural horror of Hereditary and Midsommar makes way for scattershot Covid-themed sociopolitical absurdity. Set in a dusty New Mexico town in May 2020, Eddington follows Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a sad sack reactionary sheriff at odds with the town’s progressive and self-satisfied mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).
When mask mandates arrive, Cross rejects them – and not just out of political defiance (and occasionally elder care) but also because of a long-held personal grudge.
Garcia once dated his wife, Louise (a seldom glimpsed Emma Stone), a frigid outsider artist who barely registers her husband’s travails or the escalating chaos outside.
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At its best, the director’s microcosm of the United States during the pandemic is one where every lunatic fringe proves half-right, every institutional safety net fails and every voice, whether on the left or right of the political spectrum, is a caricature. From smarmy tech bros to virtue-signalling BLM youth activists and YouTube evangelists (Austin Butler, slick and predatory), Eddington skewers all sides with a commendable equal-opportunity contempt.
The character of Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), Cross’s conspiracy-obsessed mother-in-law, is the most seething creation, a portrait of half-digested Facebook falsehoods and boomer delusion.
Critics may cry “false equivalence”, but it’s a fascinating, ambitious experiment, hinging on Phoenix’s hardbitten commitment to a shifting script and rendered as a lucid dream by Darius Khondji’s cinematography.
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Unhappily, Aster’s gleeful plague on both houses gives way to a lopsided final act. Eddington never recovers from the loss of a major character. And the Rambo-style coda heavily promoted by the film’s marketing campaign feels smugly nihilistic. Full of sound and fury, signifying something. If only we knew what that was.
In cinemas from Friday, August 22nd
