"Eddington" is Good Despite Itself

Ari Aster's COVID Western is haunting nonsense

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I kinda screwed myself over here.

There are two kinds of reviews that are fun to publish. The first is the pan. It is addictive, being amongst the first to tear down a movie, or the loudest, or the most clever. The second is the defense, pre-emptive or reactionary. Proclaiming that “x is a masterpiece, actually” activates that musty shitheel debate club corner of my brain. These are easy to write, because the tenor of their argument usually necessitates a certain casualness. And whether I’m writing about Materialists or Megalopolis, it is a pleasure to publish articles designed to get people talking.

Admittedly, this is why I saw Eddington. I thought I would get a fun review, though I wasn’t sure which type. I try not to lean too heavily on cheap thrills in my criticism; it is objectively more rewarding to prioritize work that gets weeks or months to develop. But I couldn’t resist being on the vanguard of discourse. Whether I wound up a contrarian or a hater, I was just so curious. My peers who went to Cannes spoke of the film either with disdain or befuddlement. Can you blame a girl for wanting to have a take?

So it is with panicked disappointment that I tell you that I don’t really have a good soundbite for Eddington. Anything you have heard already is probably true. It is politically asinine, with its grating 2020-isms belying an ironically reductive vision of America. It is no more a Western than Toy Story 4 was, and that movie had Forky. These aren’t novel observations.

What’s doubly frustrating, then, is that I liked the movie. I found it moving and funny and harrowing. It is Ari Aster’s first successful picture. It is only good at the edges, yet everywhere you look, there are good edges.

If that sounds like it would make for an unwieldly, exhausting experience, that’s because it does. Lots of things happen in Eddington, though it’s hard to sense a plot. Most of the action revolves around Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of a small town in New Mexico campaigning against incumbent liberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is busy lobbying for an ecologically disastrous data center nearby. Joe lives at home with his wife Louise (Emma Stone) and unstable mother-in-law (Deidre O-Connell). Part-way through the film, a series of violent events, which coincide with the BLM protests, transform the town into the national hotbed of pandemic hysteria. The chaos is compelling, and the 160-minute runtime flies by. But amidst all the hubbub, it’s easy to lose track of a set-up by the time it pays off. Aster seems so desperate to make his portrait of America comprehensive, to leave no controversy untouched, that it all feels superficial. There’s not enough room for Aster to comment, for example, on the failures of public healthcare initiatives to communicate effectively with the public, or how New Mexicans interface with the surrounding pueblo tribes. Eddington’s script is simaltaneously over- and under-written.

Ari Aster has a striking perspective on whiteness. His white characters treat their societal dominance like a demon they worship in private. Their folksy demeanor belies a neurotic drive for self-preservation, power, and violence. His previous three features all toyed with this to various extents, but none quite like here, where our hero manically absolves himself in Neo-Nazi hellfire.

But this is different than being thoughtful about race, especially in America. The non-white characters - from the indigenous police officers to Garcia,¹ are all given nothing to do. It is a damning limitation of the work that it flattens and abandons so many of the people in its world.

This is particularly jarring in the middle stretch of the film, where every other scene takes place during the George Floyd protests. The film reaches its nadir when a kid, hoping to score with the white girl leading the town’s protests (commentary!), starts rambling about his newfound leftism at the dinner table, only for his dad to call him the r-word.² This is the kind of smugness that pervades the first half of Eddington.

Of course Aster, the liberal public figure that he is, supports masking around the immuno-compromised and getting vaccinated. But isn’t it pathetic, how patrons clap when service workers kick out an unmasked old man? Isn’t it An Interesting Comparison, that the maskless Joe Cross pays for the elderly pariah’s groceries?³ Isn’t it a shame that these youngsters at the protest keep provoking the townsfolk to arm themselves? Aren’t algorithms evil? These bits of the text just sit there, uncommented upon. They’re Rorschach tests disguised as pointed satire. Maybe they’re just lazy filler, or they’re ideological dogwhistles, or scrapped Weekend Update pitches. Who cares. It’s cinematic tinnitus.

Eddington vibes

Around the time a black cop (Michael Ward)⁴ is standing in front of his teenage ex-girlfriend as she begs him to join in protest while spewing bad-faith regurgitations of abolitionist talking points, I had a grim thought: “Did I get tricked into watching Crash again?”

The answer is yes, kind of. It is true that Ari Aster shares Paul Haggis’ belief that people do not conform to strict political binaries, that we ought to focus on what we share rather than what divides us. I know this because he’s said it, and because it’s obvious anyway. Eddington has been wrongly labeled as an “edgelord” movie. I disagree. This is peak liberalism - the veneration of interpersonal niceties to mask a callous institutional bloodthirst.

Now I’m going to pivot, briefly, and spoil one (1) thing about the movie:

The film opens on a shot of an unhoused, mentally ill man, babbling to himself as he wanders along a desert road towards Eddington. He keeps showing up throughout the first half of the picture, and people keep pretending he’s not there, begging him to leave, avoiding eye contact. Eventually, Joe Cross, after a particularly humiliating day, with local tensions running high and his life unraveling at the seams, drives past the man, looting a bar, alone. Without a word, Joe gets out of the car, shoots the man at point-blank range, and dumps his body in the river. The man never comes up again.

Every action in Eddington has consequences. Every decision ripples out in a million stressful, uncontrollable directions. But Joe murdering the homeless man, that means nothing. He didn’t matter. He was not a real person.

This is the moment is where Eddington really lays down the rules of the game. From here on out, all rhetorical pussyfooting is abandoned, replaced by unrelentingly bleak theatrics. Aster has made a movie about America as a place built on the ritualistic dehumanization of those around us. Joe Cross does not see anybody in the film as a real person. The world is rendered as a collage of his most paranoid, resentful hallucinations. This unsparing examination of the vitriol at the heart of The Modern Cowboy is why, despite all my grievances, I found Eddington stirring, horrifying, and artful.

This comes through most deftly in Louise’s subplot, wherein Joe watches his wife come under the spell of a Q-Anon-adjacent cult leader played by Austin Butler (a real movie star if there ever was one). In his sole scene, Butler shows up at the Cross residence to deliver a monologue that is all bullshit, about the political elite and their absurd plots to rape children. Of course, the realities of CSA are more sinister. It happens most often in silence, in the home. This is where Louise is particularly vulnerable.

It is here, as Joe finally learns the crux of his wife’s mental illness, that they irrevocably pull apart from one another. As the camera watches Louise listen from Joe’s POV, we feel the lens begin to dehumanize her, to see her disappear. Joe uses his wife’s trauma to advance his own agendas. He refuses to hear a truth that would disrupt the very iconography with which he adorns his home. When he next brings it up, it’s in front of a ring light.

Eddington is obsessed with digital (and physical) ephemera. Aster knows how we externally construct our values and aspirations. The dialogue never made me laugh, but the TikToks, the Facebook posts, the bumper stickers, those are where the film is at its funniest.

This is in sharp contrast to the mise-en-scene, which is surprisingly elegant given Aster’s previous too-clean film-school rigor. I have a working theory that Aster has a photographer’s eye, not a filmmaker’s. Every image has a capital-I Idea, though most cannot justify more than a single frame. You can tell this in an edit, when they’re stuck awkwardly cutting between several failed money shots. At other points, though, the proximity of strong images is overpowering: Joe clinging to a despondent Louise; A drone hovering like a UFO against the desert sky; A data center glowing in the center of a canyon like radioactive waste.

Even when the compositions fall flat, the on-screen material shines. Some might call Eddington’s sense of place superficial, full of blunt semiotics and Simpsons sign gags. The movie may be a cruel cartoon, but its world is recognizable and carefully detailed. Oftentimes, the camera will draw your eye to a wall decoration, or the texture of the drywall, or the shape of the mountains, and you realize that it isn’t a metaphor or goof. It’s a personal flourish, the kind completely absent from his earlier work. For a director previously so obsessed with austere screencaps, it is jarring to encounter images that actually feel alive.

Adam Piron, in a post following Eddington’s Cannes premiere, remarks that, “Aster understands that the southwest is a place shaped by symbols, and he populates his film with them.” The line between acting choice, set design, and landscape blur in an unsettling haze. Who is Joe, if not Joaquin Phoenix’s bumbling swagger? Who is Joe, if not his cowboy hat, his gun, his copy of The Secret, the uncapped bottle of Bayer in his truck’s center console? Who is Joe, if not the mountains from which he fires his sniper?

Aster has boundless love and concern for New Mexico and its inhabitants. If he has little worth saying about the nation as a whole, the opposite rings true for his home state. The domestic fantasy Joe once held becomes his personal nightmare, one of his own makings that nevertheless leaves him helpless.⁵ Aster rightfully fears for the towns swallowed whole by tech oligarichs looking to accelerate the climate catastrophe in the name of power. He sees how promises of hospitality, freedom, and fraternity pave the way for white supremacy. In a work propelled by unreality, Aster finds total, devastating clarity.

This is how the film gets away with - at least for me - its caricatures and imprecisions. Its asinine anecdotes play, in retrospect, like intentionally hollow. Aster may believe otherwise, but his cruel streak cannot help but paint a town where good manners and American values lead only to fascism, ecological destruction, and the tokenization of its marginalized community members. It’s not that the film’s faults are essential, or secretly genius. It’s that Eddington is a successfully constructed picture whose virtues are visible despite innumerable flaws that should, by all accounts, derail the whole thing.

Then again, maybe they do! Its conceit is stymied at best, and rotten at worst. I would hesitate to recommend it to anybody! Yet I cannot shake it. Eddington is frustrating, annoying, and, in the most unexpected places, real.

see u next week :)

love ya lots,

helmet girl xx

1. This is the first time I’ve watched Pascal and felt he wasn’t miscast.

2. Admittedly, the button on the end of this kid’s arc is really funny.

3. At the Q&A after my screening Aster said that Joe Cross was inspired by Nathan Dial, who was elected mayor of Estancia, NM after being turned away from a town hall meeting for carrying a firearm, on a platform of making it compulsory to attend town meetings “legally armed.” In the film itself, concealed carry laws are changed to masking policies.

4. We are never given a reason as to why Ward became a cop. The guy is instead relegated to being a punching bag for white characters’ neuroses. This choice seems to stem from the assertion that New Mexico’s low Black population makes conversations around police brutality and institutional anti-blackness uniquely ‘complicated’ and thus, the national movements somehow apply poorly there. The solution to this obviously bad-faith argument settle for the easy (though equally irresolute) conclusion that “white people will still have prejudiced fears of (and weaponize their biases against) individual, innocent Black people.” And like…did nobody give notes on this part of the script? Somebody must have!

5. SECOND SECRET SPOILER: I think Joe ending the film as a martyred political pawn is a really, really good way of taking the Freudian shenanigans of Beau is Afraid and making it, like, actually vulnerable. It is also worth noting that Joe being disabled is not meant to be funny. I continue to be unsettled by memories of Joe’s mother-in-law wiping away his tears as he is not only cuckolded but, also resigned to the sublime terror of finding his wife unreachable on the other side of a screen, transformed and othered by the same malice that infects his immediate surroundings. The irony is that he is literally fetishized by those around him, the way he once fetishized Ward, whose camera we first see him through post-accident. This is where Eddington’s preferred “mode” - where people are only given agency or depth when they are instrumentalizing someone different to them - is at its strongest.