Review: EDDINGTON

 by Rob DiCristino

It’s a COVID western from Ari Aster. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

Come with me, if you will, back to 2020: In small-town Eddington, New Mexico, Sheriff Joe Cross (an oafish, neutered Joaquin Phoenix) — who until recently had been called on to do very little of any consequence, at all — has suddenly found himself dealing with anti-maskers in the grocery store, pop-up street protests against the murder of George Floyd, and a Facebook-addicted mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell’s Dawn) whose printouts of right-wing conspiracy articles — “Hillary’s Lizard Double,” etc. — are cluttering up the house he shares with his wife, Louise (a pallid Emma Stone). For Cross, Floyd and COVID and Q-Anon are “out there” problems, issues to be worked out in those big cities beyond the horizon. Sure, Eddington’s charismatic mayor (the now-ubiquitous Pedro Pascal as Ted Garcia) may be in the pocket of New Mexico’s liberal governor — he’s performatively enforcing her COVID protocols as part of a scheme to have a massive new AI data center built in the county — but Cross is a small-town guy, and this is small-town America.

Or at least it was. Described by writer/director Ari Aster as a “western, but the guns are phones,” Eddington captures the madness of early COVID, the perfect storm of impotent anger and mutual distrust born of masking mandates, school closures, and social media propaganda. Like many of us in those years, Cross realizes too late that the world he once knew has been turned on its head: In just a few clicks, Louise becomes ensorcelled by a YouTube cult leader (Austin Butler) who uses her unresolved childhood trauma to gain control of her life and, eventually, her womb. Elsewhere, local teenagers emboldened by Black Lives Matter protests — including Garcia’s son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) — take to the streets demanding social justice while insisting, with a pointed lack of self-awareness, that their whiteness denies them any actual authority to demand it. Hoping to make sense of the chaos and knock some good ol’ American sense back into Eddington, Cross challenges the incumbent Garcia, setting off a chain of events that soon consumes his entire life.

A pitch-black comedy that reaches its grand absurdist heights simply by depicting our Totally Fucked world exactly as it is — or, at least, as it is now — Eddington isn’t so much interested in the political discord that exacerbated the pandemic as it is in the social upheaval that cemented a new reality in the years after it dissipated. The cowboy ethics of Cross’ childhood are no match for the Facebook algorithms feeding his mother-in-law videos on numerology and his best deputy (Michael Ward as Michael) ads for cryptocurrency. Hell, not even teenage hormones can compete with the new edicts on social consciousness, with passionate Instagram activism becoming a firm prerequisite for swapping spit with your crush. Although Eddington has plenty of fun with Cross’ conservative ignorance — look for a campaign sign that reads “Your Being Manipulated!” — Aster holds both sides of the political spectrum culpable for the devolution of our discourse, and he pulls no punches when demonstrating how hypocrisy and hysteria infect far more insidiously than any virus.

It’s a good balance, and it may just draw back audiences alienated by Aster’s last picture, the bizarre and ballsy — pun absolutely intended — Beau is Afraid. As Cross, Phoenix couples a rural lawman’s swagger of unearned entitlement with a genuine sensitivity to what he perceives as injustice, whether that’s an old man being told he can’t shop for groceries without a mask or a wife who doesn’t share his wish to start a family. Cross may not be “our” hero, but he is “a” hero, in some ways, a frontier patriarch whose authentic desire to protect his community leads him to pursue — however haphazardly — a position in local government. The forces stacked against him are simply too far beyond his control or comprehension, and when he does finally cross that final moral horizon — a cowardly display of brutality that justifies the outlandish punishment he suffers in the coda — we’re less compelled to rejoice in a villain’s comeuppance than we are to mourn the loss of an American idealism that will never return and, perhaps, never even existed in the first place.

And despite Aster’s clear efforts to play it straight, Eddington is sure to be as divisive as anything else in the director’s filmography. Liberals will scoff at his glib approach to very real social evils — the black Michael’s false imprisonment, Louise’s consumption by charming cultists, and the mask-averse Cross’ contraction of COVID are ripe for thinkpieces — while conservatives may take umbrage with the film’s eccentric approach to Antifa or the ease with which Deputy Guy (Luke Grimes) implicates his black colleague in a double murder. Oh, and fans of Stone and Pascal should seriously temper their screentime expectations. But as in the most fruitful negotiations, all sides should come out of Eddington a little unhappy, if for no other reason than how effectively it eviscerates our presumption of a shared moral reality. If it isn’t clear by now, the town of Eddington is a tiny microcosm of the ungovernable, unforgiving world around it, a damning portrait of a people brought to their knees not by a new virus, but by the prejudice, anger, and insecurity that had been there all along.

Eddington hits U.S. theaters on Friday, July 18th.