Ari Aster has an impressive back catalogue of films that are utterly terrifying and hugely inventive. He is beloved of cinephiles and horror geeks, thanks to the incredible Hereditary and Midsommar. While Beau Is Afraid, which starred Joaquin Phoenix, tapped into contemporary anxieties and underpinned the director’s credentials as a real talent.
His latest film, Eddington, screening in competition in Cannes and again with Phoenix in the lead role, has intermittent glimmers of Aster’s brilliance on display, but alas this meandering and frustrating film is not a return to the director’s earlier form.
Aster described Beau Is Afraid as an ‘anxiety comedy’; Eddington might be described as a conspiracy comedy or a socials comedy. As you might imagine, there aren’t many laughs and the humour is very, very dark. It is a comedy in the way that the Coen brothers’ Fargo is a comedy: it depicts the tragedy of an ineffectual man whose increasingly desperate and terrible actions spiral horribly out of control. In this film, those actions have far wider-reaching consequences.
The Eddington of the title is the name of the small town in New Mexico of which Joe (Phoenix) is sheriff. It’s late May 2020, and Covid is on the loose. Joe is anti-masks and anti-government intervention. He is also not averse to confrontation, either with the police officers of neighbouring Pueblo (who are Navajo and far more professional than Joe’s motley crew) or with the dashing local mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal).
Joe lives with his unhappy wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). Dawn came to visit and just won’t leave. She’s obsessed with conspiracy theories, which she is constantly pummelling Louise and Joe with. One man she follows on social media is Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Introducing this man to her daughter will have huge consequences for the family. But Joe is more focused on Ted, due to the mayor’s dalliance with Louise way back when.
Eddington sits close to Navajo land. Ted has designs on creating a ‘tech-savvy future’ for his town, appropriating this land to house a huge data centre development, but if we’ve learned anything from the movies, we know that messing with sacred land can only lead to disaster.
The trouble with this film is that the disasters pile up and become muddied: Covid, police brutality, the rise of Trump, white supremacy, deep-rooted racism, paedophile victims, the lack of gun control, the inexorable use of social media and, the rise of inept and deeply flawed white men to seats of power… all of these ingredients are sprinkled into this film but Aster doesn’t follow a measured recipe either in terms of subject matter or pace.
The result is a hodgepodge that combines long stretches of tediousness with flashes of outright mayhem (I would have preferred more of the latter), pathos with farce, the personal with the political.
Phoenix is as committed and fine as always, making it hard to dislike this deeply flawed and thoroughly stupid man. As Louise, Stone is barely on screen and has scant opportunity to shine. Butler is an even more fleeting presence, while Pascal has a juicier role as the politician walking a very fine line between civic duty and personal gain. He also gets the most laughs thanks to Ted’s hilarious mayoral campaign video.
Unfortunately, the fine performances are not enough to save Eddington. This could have been a damning indictment of the calamitous collapse of US society at the hands of stupid white men, aided by social platforms and the divisive politics they engendered – and to an extent it is. If only Aster had reined in some of his more self-indulgent impulses, this would have been a truly brilliant film. Instead, we are offered mere glimpses of this director’s undoubted genius.
