‘Eddington’: You Guys Remember 2020?

Though not without some charms in its first hour, Ari Aster’s Eddington is largely a benign piece of satire with very few interesting things to say about the 2020 pandemic era. Some genuinely funny jokes and wry understanding of internet culture at that time simply can’t save a film that’s so wildly inconsistent in both narrative and tone, and with commentary that mostly boils down to “Hey, you remember this thing that happened?”

It all kicks off in May 2020, an already-challenging time period to make any film in. COVID is in full swing, and the death of George Floyd is sending ripples throughout America and the world. It’s also a time of change for Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the painfully oblivious conservative sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico, as he tries to both keep things the same by ignoring mask orders and running for mayor against a very liberal incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).

What follows is a slow unraveling of Joe’s mind as he makes mistake after mistake, revealing the incompetence of himself and many of the people in his small American town. He alienates his wife Lou (Emma Stone), runs one of the worst fictional mayoral campaigns of all time and has to deal with those pesky protestors of civil injustice while he’s at it.

The initially strong start of Eddington crumbles soon enough

I’ll admit, the first 50 or so minutes of Eddington did have me charmed. I’d accepted that the Ari Aster that made Hereditary and Midsommar is long gone, as this film immediately telegraphs itself as being much more in line with his previously polarising work Beau is Afraid. Like that movie, it starts off strong with some genuinely zany (albeit more realistic) comedy before veering hard off the track and into a painfully overlong, bizarre cinematic exercise.

I won’t describe the exact moment that Eddington switches gears and enters territory that initially appears promising before revealing itself as utterly shallow, but this moment barely happens an hour into the movie. All the funny observations about life in 2020 – the way conspiracies took over people’s brains, capital-D Democrat liberal virtue signalling, fake progressivism and nobody knowing how to wear a mask – give way to something much weirder and, frankly, more stupid.

The actors are largely innocent in this process, with Joaquin Phoenix giving an oddly fun performance as Joe. It feels based on the standard American psyche at that moment in time, and his natural gifts as an actor are able to anchor some of the more utterly dumbfounding stuff that happens throughout Eddington.

Even in the section of the movie I liked, some of the commentary about BLM protests and the death of George Floyd felt a little tasteless to me. Not only does the film refuse to meaningfully engage with the perspective of its one Black character, it also mocks teenagers adopting socially conscious language for the first time while operating at the same superficial level of commentary for its entire runtime.

A superficial film about how COVID broke everyone’s brains

Pedro Pascal is really great in the movie, even though he’s got about three scenes all up; Austin Butler plays a similarly, disappointingly small role. It feels obvious to say Emma Stone was great, but I particularly liked Deirdre O’Connell as Lou’s conspiratorial mother Dawn and the duo Luke Grimes and Michael Ward as deputies that Joe unwittingly ropes into his schemes. Ultimately though, none of these actors are used to their full potential.

Yet none of it can save Eddington as it shoots for the stars and crashes right back down to Earth with its incredibly strange mid-film turn that transitions the movie from comedy to Serious Film Mode to staggeringly poor effect. Aster’s moment-to-moment directing is good, but you can almost feel him trying to wrest control of the film back as it goes on. It stops even being about COVID, and the influence of the Coen Brothers is felt but, certainly not replicated!

It made Aster’s latest film a pretty miserable experience for me, an exercise in trite that only grows more tiresome as it progresses. Much like the pandemic it takes place during, Eddington really felt like it would last forever while I was watching – maybe that’s a subtle work of genius on the part of the director… but as you can probably tell, I doubt that.

★½

Eddington is in cinemas now.