Review: Eddington

There are movies about America, and then there are movies that feel like America: sweat-soaked, tense, self-righteous, delusional, and frantically scrolling through Twitter at 2:17 a.m. in a Walgreens parking lot. Ari Aster’s Eddington is the latter, a COVID-era modern western filtered through the collective psychic collapse of a nation that once Googled “how long does COVID live on cardboard?” and now Googles “how to survive a civil war.”

This is not your father’s western. It’s barely your own. It’s a dusty, dread-choked ghost story set in a town that never stood a chance. If No Country for Old Men haunted the dying embers of 20th-century cowboy masculinity, Eddington blows on those embers until they flare up and set the whole house ablaze, then blames the algorithm.

Ari Aster take a brave and bold swing in making a film so close to the biggest world event in the last 5 years. Set in the purgatory of May 2020, that void where mask mandates, live-streamed executions, and Tik-Toks of bread-making coexisted, the film introduces us to Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a man whose every facial expression seems to ask, “Why do I have to deal with the world in my small town?”

Phoenix, doing career-best glazed despair, plays Joe like a sheriff whose badge is held on with masking tape and denial. He’s asthmatic, anti-mask, and allergic to reality, a “common sense” conservative whose personal ethos was cribbed from the comment section of a Joe Rogan clip. His wife (Emma Stone, channeling QAnon-chic with tragic finesse) is halfway down a YouTube rabbit hole, his mother-in-law (a terrifyingly plausible Deirdre O’Connell) is already nesting in it, and his town is coming apart faster than a freshly sanitized grocery bag.

Enter Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, weaponizing his charm), a former tech bro turned local liberal messiah. Ted masks up, says all the right things, and is secretly planning to sell off the town’s outskirts to a data center run by something named solidgoldmagikarp, which sounds made up but feels inevitable. The film opens and ends with shots of it. He’s Joe’s old enemy, old rival, and perhaps most devastatingly, his wife’s ex. If Eddington has a villain, it’s… all of them, really. No one escapes Aster's sense of macabre prodding.

But Aster resists cheap finger-pointing. Eddington isn’t about choosing a side, it’s about realizing the sides have metastasized into separate realities, each propped up by a different influencer and fortified with internet-tinged paranoia. The town’s teens stage Black Lives Matter protests for girls they’re crushing on. The sheriff live-streams a mayoral campaign from his garage. A YouTube guru (Austin Butler, greasy and hypnotic) whispers sweet nothings like “your pain isn’t a coincidence.” Everyone is online, and no one is present. Anyone with a point of view can feel validated thanks to us all being online.

And yet, for all its absurdity, the film feels heartbreakingly accurate. It captures that particular brand of 2020 madness, the neurotic optimism curdled into performative despair, the broken institutions, the clout-fueled politics, the sense that reality had been forked like bad open-source code. At one point, a campaign ad shows Pascal’s Ted noodling a piano alone in the middle of Main Street, which is either a joke or a sincere appeal to voters. It plays like both. So does the whole movie. Later in the film, it's first burst of violence is immediately followed by a confrontational scene scored to Katy Perry's "Firework." Mileage may vary with a film with such competing tones yet this aspect is what makes the film work beyond mere provocation.

By the time Joe’s political aspirations curdle into full-blown farce, the film has shed any pretense of satire. The town descends into chaos not because of a virus, or a conspiracy, but because it finally becomes the town everyone already believed it was. What’s worse than a lie? A lie that becomes true because enough people believe it.

Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton’s score wails like the ghost of American optimism often commenting on Joe's mental state with sly humor. If Beau Is Afraid was about one man’s nervous breakdown, Eddington is about everyone else’s. Aster's neurosis is one full display in both.

In the second half, John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln flickers briefly on a screen, a last gasp of civic myth. But this isn’t Ford country. This is Miranda July by way of Robert Altman by way of Twitter doom-scroll. Here, instead of forging connections, people fire rounds. The shared dream of America has been replaced by adjacent hallucinations, and nobody’s coming to wake us up.

It’s uncomfortable, unrelenting, and unhinged. It is also overstuffed but this is trademark of Aster. He may bite off more than the film needs to but Eddington is consistently funny and tragic in equal measure and it earns its runtime. Aster has made a film that doesn’t just capture a moment, it exorcises it. Not with catharsis, but with confrontation. Eddington doesn’t end. It lingers. In many ways, it is his most frightening film and likely his most divisive. This is one of the most fascinating and wild films of the year.

4.5/5