10/12 ForReel Score | 4/5 Stars

Pro tip: if you’re gonna make a movie about the pandemic without it being divisive, then you’ve done something wrong. Initial reactions to writer/director Ari Aster’s latest film, Eddington, have been referring to the film as either “irresponsibly reckless” or “the greatest American satire in years”, a playing field so broad that I was biting my nails in fear of what I was in for. Retrospectively, a lot of the doomsaying about Eddington reminds me more of the precursory paranoia around 2019’s Joker potentially inspiring mass shootings around the country (spoiler alert: it didn’t). A height-of-COVID-era satire of a society tearing itself apart from the inside, I found Eddington as hilarious as it is searing, but, after all of the preemptive handwringing, Aster’s provocativeness barely reaches that of your average South Park episode. Ari Aster has no interest in half-measures, and, while Eddington might not be his best work, it’s definitely his most scorching.

Eddington follows Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), a deeply inadequate New Mexican sheriff who, believing that he’s above both the law and COVID mandates, tries to run for mayor. He resents Eddington’s current mayor, the ever-so-catty Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is trying to bring a big Silicon Valley-style tech firm to town. What vexes Cross more than Garcia’s blistering neoliberalism and modernist progressivism is that Garcia used to date Cross’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone). Eddington reeks of the era with pinpoint accuracy, no questions asked (I still get flashbacks to the lazy performativeness of the #BlackOutTuesday Instagram “movement”), but the illusion of Eddington is that it’s an impotence thriller disguised as a Western. Without beating around the bush, Joe Cross is a dipshit, and he’s the biggest fish in a pond full of morons. That’s not to say there aren’t smart characters in Eddington, but their presence makes the stupidity of everything around them all the more tangible.

One could argue that Eddington taking jabs at both conservatives and liberals means that the film doesn’t know what it wants to say, but it’s incredibly naive to believe that stupidity doesn’t cross political barriers. Between the soapbox performativeness of liberals to make themselves look better to their peers and the unyielding stubbornness of conservatives, Eddington’s scattershot takedown of contemporary America is probably the most “neo” a neo-western has gotten since David Mackenzie’s Hell or High Water. In a sense, Eddington is most similar to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, in which a virus is merely a catalyst for everyone’s simmering dark sides to surface in the ugliest ways possible. At a glance, Eddington might be Aster’s most misanthropic work, but the thematic throughline of “How did we get here?” is Aster at his most tragic.

What’s funny about Eddington, aside from a sense of humor that’s drier than the New Mexico desert, is how it plays with America’s existing political landscape and morphs it into a heightened sandbox for Aster to toy with. COVID-era familiarities like your weekly “the sky is falling” headlines and endless social media doomscrolling are wrapped together with gun-toting ANTIFA terrorists ripped straight from the delusions of the average Fox News viewer. Rather than looking for solutions, Aster’s focus is on dissecting the American mind’s decay during and after the pandemic. Aster isn’t looking for everybody to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” together; he’s looking for what’s preventing that from happening. If you want the guy who directed Beau is Afraid to give you all the answers to America’s deep-seated sociopolitical problems, then I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.

Ari Aster and Joaquin Phoenix are two-for-two when it comes to bizarre psychological torture at Phoenix’s expense, with Joe Cross being another splendid entry in Phoenix’s canon of pathetic, impulsive, violent, and spineless male protagonists. He begins as your average “Don’t Tread on Me” right-winger who will find any excuse to get out of COVID protocol, and ends up spraying-and-praying with the biggest gun he could find on an open street (par for the course when your protagonist is a cop). His deputies, Guy (Luke Grimes) and Michael (Micheal Ward), are morally dubious at best, with the former being a full-fledged racist and the other having a preference for jailbait. The racial parameters between Cross and Guy (the white cops) and Michael (the black cop) bubble into the expected disaster that comes from the setup, but Aster’s condemnation of each of these characters, in one way or another, starts and ends with the badge’s upholstery of a flawed system gone unchecked.

All of Aster’s works, from his viral short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons to Eddington, are intended to stir the pot, but Eddington stirs the pot to a degree that the film feels like an elaborate troll on the viewer. Aster has always been a morbidly goofy guy, with that morbidity and goofiness walking a razor’s edge in Eddington, a razor’s edge that’s sure to cut anyone too arrogant to look inward and laugh at themselves a little bit. Aster isn’t gonna baby you or coddle you into thinking that everything’s gonna be okay; he’s here to either make fun of you or have you laugh with him. Eddington’s cynicism (not misanthropism) almost reads like the dour tone of No Country for Old Men, but if the Coen brothers were sketch-comedy writers instead of Best Picture winners. Paired with the film’s poster art, an untitled photo by David Wojnarowicz in which three buffalo charge headfirst off a cliff, Eddington is quite the befitting encapsulation of modern American hubris.

Films like Eddington are ripe for meaningful conversations, but given the current state of affairs, I worry that the conversations surrounding Eddington will be a microcosm of the film itself. The next few years will decide if Eddington ages like fine wine or old milk, but, as of now, Eddington is about as relevant as satires get. As someone who came of age during the pandemic (I spent most of my senior year on Zoom), I’ve noticed that my younger peers have been far more receptive to Eddington than the older ones. Maybe Ari Aster is ahead of the curve, or maybe Eddington is more relatable to those who have grown up believing that our current political climate is the norm. Either way, between Photoshop punchlines of Marjorie Taylor Greene, unsubtle allusions to Kyle Rittenhouse, or TikTok dances about reading James Baldwin, Eddington is a scarily timely takedown of the modern American mind that will surely be a hard pill to swallow for many. Aster’s sheer absurdity may not work in the moment, but once I had the big picture, I couldn’t stop giggling as I left the theater.

If Eddington were to be summed up in a word, it would be “hypocrisy”. Mayor Garcia claims to be progressive but refers to outspoken women as “bitches” who need to be “shut down,” and Sheriff Cross tells his campaign videographer to edit out a moment in which he calls a kid the F-slur on camera. In one moment, Cross is preaching that there isn’t any COVID in Eddington, and he’s getting a drive-thru COVID test in another. Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), an Alex Jones/Andrew Tate-esque cult leader/guru, preaches about freeing the mind while also ensnaring the impressionable (Deirdre O’Connell is insanely funny as Emma Stone’s deranged conspiracy theorist mother) into his “cause”. A white girl lectures a black man for being a police officer amidst a BLM protest, and a white boy preaches from a pedestal that other white people should sit down and listen to minorities. Eddington’s core idea isn’t that the pandemic sparked the shit-slinging, but that the pandemic was merely a catalyst for Americans to show their true selves. And, if Eddington’s last ten minutes are any indicator, we’re gonna be stuck in this rut for a very long time.

Movie Review: "Eddington"; A Piercing Satire On American Political Hypocrisy