It would be folly for me to pretend that I haven’t held the films of Ari Aster in contempt for some time. Before writing this review, I generally thought of him as a one-trick pony. One-trick in that Hereditary was his only movie worth seeing. Granted, I remember very little of it at this point, except what it lifts from Rosemary’s Baby (in a very loose occult sense) and that absolutely nightmarish scene involving a telephone pole. One could say horror is 90% great imagery above all else, and I’d believe it in the case of that sequence. I can’t even let my dogs stick their heads too far out the window because of it.
But everything that followed made my confidence in him immediately evaporate. Whether it was the xeroxed modernization of The Wicker Man in Midsommar, a film that just gets worse the further one strays from it, or Beau Is Afraid, which contained about 35 minutes of watchable footage—one could not be blamed for taking on the news of another Aster project as a threat to be wielded at the innocent cinephile.
Then you hear about the project’s actual aims, that it takes place right in the middle of the COVID pandemic, in a small town in New Mexico called Eddington that sees its hapless sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) squaring off with its slick deal-making mayor (Pedro Pascal)—first over mask mandates and then over issues of a much more personal nature. To say it gave me some pause would be an understatement. How many movies have we had about the pandemic to this point? Not many that I can recall other than John Hyams’ Sick (good fun, by the way, though some of that may have been the Midnight Madness audience in Toronto). Aster has never struck me as a particularly incisive filmmaker, particularly when one attempt (the aforementioned turd, Beau) fell utterly flat. This combination felt like a recipe for disaster. But, despite that, I’m a sucker for a rural neowestern. Given all these factors, I had to see it through.
And you know what? I’m glad I did. I don’t think Eddington is “rush out to see it” cinema, but I do think it’s a solidly made little satire and certainly more in line with the kind of complex filmmaking I was hoping for from him when he first hit the scene about a decade ago. At its heart, Eddington is a solid little potboiler about a man feeling like the world is falling apart around him. And then it really does begin to fall apart, and he lashes out in predictably unfortunate ways. He has to deal with the consequences of those actions and hits increasing ratchets of desperation in arriving at that point.
In tone and, to some degree structure, Eddington is quite a bit like one of the crime films of the Coen Brothers—it has the same kind of “yokel getting in over his head” storytelling approach, and I’d argue is better than any film they’ve made (together or apart) in the last 10 years. Granted, it’d be easy to slag Aster as being not much more than a stylistic mimic, given his history of riffing on filmmakers like Robin Hardy and Charlie Kaufmann to increasingly distressing degrees, but at least here he finds a more welcome home for his own in-grown talents including a penchant for humor.
One of the more underrated aspects of his leading man, Phoenix (and don’t let the ensemble nature of the thing fool you, it’s a Phoenix vehicle, from top to bottom) is just how funny he is. Granted, if you’d seen his excellent turn in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, this would be no surprise, but that Aster has observed this is probably one of the sharpest tools he has at his disposal. From awkwardly timed line readings to physical comedy, it’s a welcome return for Phoenix from his current reputation as a serious “actor’s actor.”
Once the shape of Eddington comes into view and it turns properly into this strange little amalgam of movies like No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man, and Burn After Reading, it combines its strands of its increasingly pathetic lead, its beautiful desert vistas (Darius Khondji shoots the dying town at its center in the same loving way Allen Daviau lensed suburbia), and the secret cabal of religious figures and terrorists that are chipping away at the edges of the screen. But before then, I would argue that Aster does fall into some of the traps that its initial pitch warrants.
Scenes of masked individuals shaming those who would not comply with state mandates along with the usual whinging from those who refused to wear masks singing the old “I can’t breathe with this thing” canard are given equal scorn. All the obvious targets get hit, especially when the George Floyd protests begin in earnest and within Eddington those take shape without a single black person in attendance. While I think some of his COVID-specific farce becomes an exercise in playing both sides so much that he struggles to find anything to say at all, when his storytelling eye shifts over to its little cadre of white teens whose hearts were in the right place, it finds a better target to highlight some of the fundamental absurdity of the time.
By the point that both of those aspects become further backgrounded and just act as inciting incidents for what’s to come for Sheriff Joe Cross and his terrible decision-making skills, Eddington‘s strengths are what stick with you the most. At least, on balance. It’s an Aster film after all—what do you expect?