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Image courtesy of A24. |
Director Ari Aster has gone from one of cinema's most acclaimed new horror maestros to oddball provocateur. While the latter description tends to result in the type of films that I find intriguing, Aster's earlier work remains - to me, at least - the most effective.
"Hereditary" was a nightmarish horror movie that announced the arrival of a real talent while "Midsommar," if not quite as memorable, boasted a great lead performance and was mostly gripping from start to finish. I admired his odd "Beau is Afraid," even if I didn't quite love it, but his latest film, "Eddington," somewhat misses the mark, despite some solid performances and memorable moments.
The film, a social satire-turned western, is seemingly loaded with potential. It is set in 2020 in a small New Mexico town amid the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the summer Black Lives Matter marches following the murder-by-police of George Floyd. The film aims to examine why and how society collapsed during this moment and neighbor turned against neighbor, rather than having the empathy that was required of the moment.
The film's lead is Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix, who's solid here), the small town of Eddington's sheriff who doesn't believe he should have to go along with the new rules about masking in public. He defends an elderly man in a grocery store who refuses to wear a mask as a crowd of masked onlookers criticizes him and captures the moment on their iPhones.
Cross's primary antagonist is Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who scolds Cross during the scenario. Their animosity goes further back, however, due to Cross's wife (Emma Stone) allegedly being impregnated by Garcia when she was 16 years old. Garcia - and Cross's wife - deny that this is what happened, but the sheriff's mother-in-law, an avid conspiracy theorist, fans the flames of the rumor.
Following the grocery store masking incident, Cross decides to run for mayor, challenging Garcia, which inflames tensions in the town. At the same time, a group of primarily white youths starts holding Black Lives Matter protests after Floyd's death. Garcia's son (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and a young woman (Amelie Hoeferle) seem sincere about the protests, though the film takes a somewhat jaded portrayal of their characters, while another youth (Cameron Mann) has other intentions.
Meanwhile, Stone's Louise Cross has gotten mixed up with a shady cult-like figure (Austin Butler) who appears to be obsessed with pedophiles in places of power. All of this makes Cross, who starts the film as world weary but becomes increasingly unhinged, begin to lose his grip.
There are some interesting moments in "Eddington," primarily in the film's first half as it examines the mostly bad behavior of Americans as they react to one of the most perilous moments in our recent history. Phoenix and Pascal make for good nemeses and there's some decent tension in their escalating feud.
But as the film nears its halfway mark, it starts to spin out of control and, at times, comes off as an empty provocation. One of its main problems is its satirical marks. There's plenty of satire to be had at the expense of people whose absurd conspiracy theories fueled the drama during the COVID-19 pandemic and there are brief references to things like Ivermectin and the Pizzagate conspiracy (though it's not called that here).
But the film makes the same mistake as our lost-in-the-woods national media by thinking it must somehow even the scales between the two sides it's parodying. It wants to make all sides look crazy, but it is a ridiculous comparison when trying to show how everyone lost their minds during this era by making Black Lives Matter protesters and the vaccine deniers who refused to wear masks appear as one and the same.
It's also telling that the ultimate shootout in the film doesn't come from gun-toting Trump supporters - you know, the types who have actually shot up synagogues and grocery stores - but rather right-wing media's favorite imaginary boogeyman, Antifa. The film gets bloody during its denouement, and its end is cynical enough to ring true in our current moment, which is somehow even more awful than the one depicted here.
But while Aster elicited some genuine shocks in his two early horror movies - and even to an extent in the peculiar "Beau is Afraid" - he's not on as firm of footing this time around. There are some interesting elements in "Eddington" and most of the performance are good, but it's a social satire that only partially captures the craziness of the moment that we had the misfortune to live through five years ago.