Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Ari Aster
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O'Connell, Micheal Ward
Before making his debut with 2018's Hereditary, writer/director Ari Aster had toyed with making a western as his first feature. A version of that western now takes the form of Aster's fourth feature, Eddington. Aster went back to his original script and rewrote it to take place in the summer of 2020. That summer of COVID mask mandates and Black Lives Matter protests saw the phrase "I can't breathe" adopted as a slogan by both sides of the political divide. There's a decent western somewhere in Eddington, but it's smothered in half-baked political satire that denies it the chance to breathe.
Aster spends the first half of his film introducing various characters and subplots, but the core plot is centred on small town New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his rival, town mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Like many western rivals, the roots of their division can be traced to a woman: Joe's unstable wife Louise (Emma Stone), once Ted's teenage lover. Their animosity has now been heightened by a mask mandate which Joe refuses to enforce and which Ted complies with only when it's convenient for him to do so.
Eddington is most compelling when focussed on the sparring and growing tension between these two men who represent the worst traits of conservatism and liberalism. They're a complicated pair. Joe is a contrarian asshole but he seems to care about his community. Ted says all the right things but is often exposed as a sanctimonious hypocrite. For those of us who are neither conservative nor liberal, there's an undeniable pleasure in seeing these two annoying mindsets being satirised.
But Aster overeggs his film with too many side characters who never get the same attention as Joe and Ted. There's Joe's mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), a conspiracy theorist who introduces Louise to Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a Russell Brand type charlatan who has seized on the madness of the pandemic to become a quasi-cult leader. Clifton Collins Jr plays a homeless man who wanders aimlessly in and out of scenes (if this were a Robert Altman film, it's this character who would have the last laugh). Michael Ward plays a young black deputy who finds himself a pawn manipulated by his sheriff and BLM protestors, both demanding he take a side. One of the BLM protestors, Brian (Cameron Mann), has cynically adopted the cause in the hopes of winning over fellow activist Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle). Brian's trajectory is perhaps the film's most intriguing subplot, mirroring the left to right heel turn made by the likes Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard and JD Vance.
Aster constructs his film's first half as though he were writing the pilot of a TV series and thought he had another 10 hours of programming at his disposal. Halfway through, Eddington eventually turns into a movie, and all these characters and subplots are swept aside in favour of criminal cover-ups and shootouts. When it does turn into a movie, it's a pretty good one, Aster displaying a surprising affinity for staging action. The trouble is we don't have a white-hatted hero to root for in this showdown, so we simply watch in anticipation of a certain character getting their deserved comeuppance. The character who really should take centre stage in the finale (Ward's deputy) is, like the rest of the supporting cast, brushed aside. It's typical of Aster's edgelord cynicism that he squanders the opportunity to give the audience a heroic figure to get behind. And that he would rather take a white man down than raise a black man up is emblematic of everything that's wrong with today's white liberalism.
Eddington is in UK/ROI cinemas from August 22nd.
