RATING
Director(s): Ari Aster
Country: United States
Author: Ari Aster
Actor(s): Joaquin Phoenix, Deirdre O’Connell, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal
Written by Tom Augustine
There are no Trump supporters in the small, desolate American town of Eddington — or at least, none of them are out and proud. That’s not to say the spectre of Trump isn’t present, a lurking ghoul that lives in your algorithm, but none of the denizens of the town can be seen sporting red caps or chanting about walls, at least as far as I could tell. It feels like the most glaring inaccuracy of Eddington, which otherwise goes to great lengths to transpose the rabid, doomstricken and terminally online visage of The Culture to the big screen. The low-hanging fruit that Trump represents is a deeply cursed one, too, and so it’s understandable that iconoclastic director Ari Aster would exercise restraint in laying on too thick the MAGA presence that has so swept through America’s small, vulnerable communities — if Trump is too present in your film, the film summarily becomes about Trump (which this film of course is, but generally in subtler manifestations). Eddington is also a period piece, so to speak, flashing back five years to a period that largely feels like a worldwide hallucination at this point, with doubt and concern flying around the novel coronavirus, masking in full force, and the idea that we may actually see something like racial justice in our lifetime off the back of the George Floyd protests building to fever pitch. The COVID era, also, was surely the lowest ebb of Trump’s popularity, as he flailed about while the virus swept across the nation. What a time to be alive, as the saying goes. If the past is a foreign country that we’re eternally beating toward, boats against the current, then 2020 is another planet entirely.
Recently I watched Hereditary for the first time. Aster’s breakout film was always one that hung sinisterly in the corner, awaiting my eventual visit — at the time it was setting the film sphere alight I was still very much timidly testing the waters of horror after a childhood forswearing it, and eventually declared that it was simply ‘too scary for me’. Time hasn’t necessarily been especially kind to Hereditary — as a debut film, the craft is assured, but the schematic of its drama doesn’t really land, Aster’s overtly self-serious tone bringing an operatic shading to the performances that never really jibes with the sillier directions the film takes in its final stretches. Beyond that, there’s the film’s intense virality — for better and mostly worse, Aster’s opening salvo into the ‘A24 trauma horror’ subgenre is arguably the single most influential film in horror cinema in the current day. The film’s tone, style, and thematics have been lifted wholesale by lesser filmmakers, a whole bevy of trauma-horror pretenders that have diluted the impact of the original significantly. It’s a fascinating fate for a film to have — a film so groundbreaking and influential that the works it sired double back to hobble it. Eddington seems unlikely to share the same fate — already earmarked as something of a commercial flop, it is entirely too singular and peculiar a film to have characteristics that the breakout-hit hungry are likely to flock toward. It is also by far the best of Aster’s films, a mad synthesis of the filmmaker’s brazen oddness and muscular filmmaking tendencies that is leavened by a dash of ‘little stinker’ humour. The initial read a viewer has of Eddington, a mishmash of culture war signifiers tossed willy-nilly into a small town entirely too provincial and insular to handle them, is merely window-dressing — Aster aims to take the current social temperature, sure, but his pet themes of masculinity in crisis and the alienating horror of the everyday are ever present, and rewardingly invested in characters that feel fully fleshed-out.
By far the best film Ari Aster has yet directed, Eddington corrals a bevy of social and cultural signposts from the COVID era into a heady stew, then eclipses them entirely to scratch at deeper, darker recesses of the American soul. As indebted to South Park and Grand Theft Auto as the Westerns of yore, it is a complex, potent fable that circles and remixes Aster’s pet themes of emasculation and alienation.
Joaquin Phoenix, in his second go-round with Aster after Beau is Afraid and best performance in years, stars as Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington. Cross is the incensed, emasculated American male du jour, his reactionary politics largely derived from his own feelings of incompetence and woundedness at no longer being the ultimo hombre in the social pecking order. His wife Louise (Emma Stone), an introverted creator of strange little dolls she sells on Etsy, only barely puts up with and harbours virtually no affection toward him. They live with Louise’s mother, Dawn (an excellent Dierdre O’Connell), a conspiracy theorist eager to glom on to any suggestion that, as the film hilariously puts it in a slogan printed on Cross’ police car, ‘your being manipulated’. To make matters worse, it’s 2020, and the COVID pandemic is in full, terrifying force. The mask mandate is in place, which Cross cannot abide, citing his asthma. In refusing to wear a mask at a grocery store, Cross is inspired by the feelings of populist rage within him to run for Mayor against Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), the neoliberal Democratic incumbent, himself deep in the pockets of corporate interests — in particular an AI company, the hilariously named solidgoldmagikarp, who hope to build an environmentally destructive energy farm on the outskirts of the town. Subplots galore swirl around this central conflict, many focusing on the younger residents of the town engaged in their own political, sexual and personal struggles. There’s also a spiritual (read: cult) leader courting Louise’s interests, played with serpentine charm by Austin Butler in a small, rewarding turn. This is all before things take a turn toward the violent, as they inevitably must — but across 160 minutes, Aster keeps the pace at an enthralling clip. It’s arguably the first of his indulgent, maximalist works not to feel overstuffed — or rather, to make that overstuffing integral to the film’s success.
Much of the criticism of Eddington has focussed on Aster’s cynicism, and a perceived contempt for his characters. It’s a criticism that’s frequently levelled at the Coens, too, whose DNA feels ingrained in this film’s execution. There’s most certainly a gleeful snark to Eddington not too-far divorced from the likes of South Park, but as with the great Coen films on misfortune (Fargo, A Serious Man and the like), the trials that the characters go through are drawn from their own actions, and reveal their ugly humanity. Arguably, these are the most human Aster’s characters have ever felt — Toni Collette’s celebrated turn in Hereditary only rises above rote scripting through the sheer force of will the actress injects into it, ditto Florence Pugh in Midsommar — the sheen of the film’s ‘big ideas’ gradually falling away to reveal a story of man-made (man specifically) folly that sometimes looks like the hands of fate tightening the noose. There’s a Nashville-esque panoply of ideas and plug-ins at play, a work of extreme density that all-but demands a return viewing. It helps that it is also Aster’s most visually astute work. Rarely has the infernal world of the cellphone been rendered with such skill on screen, and Aster displays some astonishing action chops in the third act blowout, as tense and exhilarating as it is shockingly bloody (one imagines Peckinpah smiling). Not every target is hit, and a few veer wildly into trepidatious territory, particularly in Aster’s handling of race – never the director’s strong suit. What Eddington is, though, is bold. I’ve spoken before about how frustrating it is that so few major filmmakers seem interested in conjuring stories about our current moment — even our foremost auteurs like Scorsese, Nolan and Tarantino haven’t made a non-period work in many years. What holds these filmmakers at bay, one wonders? It is incredibly difficult to put a stake down on the current moment, to say anything of substance in a substance-less time. Eddington is a kind of period piece, yes, but we are not so far removed from the COVID era that we can make any declarative statements of genuine permanence. All we can do, as Eddington does, is reflect our warped image back at us, with a few sharp jabs thrown in for good measure. As the tagline for the film goes, ‘hindsight is 2020’.
Eddington is in cinemas now.