by Robert Bouffard, Editor
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been no shortage of movies and shows attempting to depict what life feels like. The Borat sequel tackled it head-on, Dumb Money looked at a socioeconomic movement with a pandemic backdrop, and Civil War was deeply influenced by the political uprisings of the time, while sitcoms like Superstore and Brooklyn Nine-Nine seemingly had no choice but to confront the ways their characters would respond to the changing landscape. But apart from Bo Burnham’s Inside, nothing has managed to reach a good level of verisimilitude about our current and not-so-distant past times, while also being a good movie that says something worthwhile. Yet somewhat surprisingly, Ari Aster’s latest endeavor, Eddington, manages to fit that bill.
Set in the titular fictional small town in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico in May of 2020, the film portrays a group of people all with wildly different ways of coping with being locked in their homes, and having to wear masks when they’re outside. The town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (a perfectly-pitched bumbly Joaquin Phoenix, picking up where he left off after his last Aster collaboration), has asthma, and says that masks make it difficult for him to breathe — though it’s clear the real reason he neglects to wear one is because his wife (Louise, played by Emma Stone, who’s good if underutilized, as she’s taking a break from Yorgos Lanthimos films) doesn’t love him like he thinks she should (she’s gone full conspiracy-brained), and he wants to have control somewhere in his life. When Joe is confronted by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, who gets to continue his streak of being very good in real movies before Fantastic Four releases), who has skeletons of his own, because of his insubordination defying state mandates, he decides he needs to unseat Ted in the upcoming election.
Like Aster’s best work (that’s Midsommar for those who think it’s his previous horror film), Eddington has a lot of sympathy for a lot of people, yet it doesn’t excuse their actions. Because while it centers an ostensible dope of a cop, the movie is also about performative, self-aggrandizing, left wing activism, those who fall down online conspiracy rabbit holes, and distrust of public servants. It certainly understands why people get to all these different points, and feels sorry for them. It hurts when your wife doesn’t love you, or when you feel like you deserve more from the world, or when the people you trust most aren’t who they say they are. Yet what you do with this information is up to you. Though Eddington has criticism aplenty for people on both sides of the aisle, its heart is definitely not in the place of centrism. Rather, it’s throwing its hands up lamenting how we’ve gotten to a point in society when everyone’s out for themselves instead of their fellow human.
Because the people of Eddington live as much on their phones (more specifically, on the internet) as they do in their sequestered New Mexico town. From teens being horny, to young adults trying to score activist points by talking down to their exes, to adults in their 30s being manipulated by the news, to middle-aged adults soaking in the rot of social media, to older adults not knowing how to discern truth from fiction on any of their screens, these people are being made to hate each other. And it only makes sense, then, that Ted’s main point in his reelection campaign is to allow for the building of a new data center on the outskirts of town. He claims it will bring jobs, as well as the rest of your typically vague campaign promises, but he’s ultimately compromised by Big Tech.
Eddington takes its time (roughly the first hour of a nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie) to establish that everyone living online has completely broken the way we interact with each other. And the way these interactions are portrayed is as effortlessly real as any I’ve seen in a movie since the outbreak of the pandemic. That comes from Aster’s sympathy for his characters (something he’s had on his mind since Midsommar — joining a murderous cult is fundamentally a bad thing, but understanding why someone would do so is perhaps the film’s entire point). Since online life becoming real life manifests in so many different ways for so many different people, there’s a reason behind it all: Big Tech and the oligarchy will ultimately benefit from people’s every-growing squabbles, especially as they migrate from the screen to the real world. This sympathy allows the movie to avoid the holier-than-thou cynicism of the likes of Don’t Look Up, or the completely out-of-touch portrayal of young people in most modern Hollywood output. Aster likely recognizes many of the same proclivities within himself, and is here making Eddington as the aforementioned lament.
All the while, the movie’s characters are only out for themselves, whether it’s Joe’s larger ambition to become mayor and remove mask mandates (with his myriad campaign signs absolutely littered with grammatical errors), or Brian (Cameron Mann), a teenager who becomes involved in the Black Lives Matter movement simply because he has a crush on a girl who’s interested in social justice. None of the characters actually care for the vagabond (Clifton Collins Jr.) who shows up at the very beginning of the movie and immediately sows trouble. Because he’s only really sowing trouble due to the lack of care those around him have for him — he’s treated as less than human from the jump, and a pivotal moment involving him sends the movie into the narrative tailspin that is its back chunk. And if we poorly treat the people who are easiest to disregard — if we see them as less than human — it only makes it easier to do so to everyone. Soon, humans aren’t humans to us anymore; rather, they become their ideas, or what we see them to represent, and Eddington puts that concept on full display.
Many of the film’s observations aren’t particularly novel, but watching everything play out in a typically Aster kind of way ultimately makes it so the juice is worth the squeeze. The first hour almost gets boring (probably the main ding against the movie) due to its naturalistic realism — it’s such a distinct recreation of what it felt like to live in 2020 America that it’s almost just a, “That’s it?” But once it reaches its pivotal scene, things totally escalate, and for a little bit we get to see what Aster’s version of Heat would be. The movie stops its supposed both sides-ing to show that despite an understanding of, and sympathy for, why its characters act the way they do, their actions are deeply destructive.
Cops, victims of various abuses, young people trying to do the right thing, and incumbent mayors are all just narcissistically out for points in a game they have no shot of winning. We have all forgotten how to be people and how to gauge what is real, and that means there are lots of horrible, selfish actions by everyone, to everyone else. Eddington has an underlining sadness which frames everything that happens — once it makes its big narrative turn, that’s its way of saying what happens in the first half is so few steps removed from what happens in the second half, that the latter is almost a logical continuation of the former.
Sometimes there’s value in a movie like this. Especially when it’s as well done as Eddington. It’s not so much nihilistic as it is mourning the State Of Things. It doesn’t think it’s better than anyone, and it knows it doesn’t have any specific solutions — it’s just disheartened that things have gotten to this place.
Rating: High Side of Liked It
Eddington is currently playing in theaters
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