Words by JANE CROWTHER
‘Hindsight,’ runs Eddington’s tagline on its poster depicting buffalo tumbling off the side of a cliff, ‘is 2020’. For Ari Aster’s latest, that means training his quirky eye on America, linking where we are now to events of 2020 when Covid bred paranoia, conspiracy and MAGA like a socio-polical petri dish. Popping the pandemic in a neo-noir Western set in the appellative New Mexico town during May of that year, Aster picks at virtue signalling, bandwagonning, social media, fake news, radicalisation, trauma and first amendment jingoism via the moral and emotional meltdown of the town sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix).
A mild-mannered chap in a fraught marriage to his doll-making, damaged wife Lou (Emma Stone) and living with his conspiracist mother-in-law (Deidre O’Connell), Joe is law-abiding until medical mandates come around. An asthma-sufferer, the sheriff does not believe anyone should wear a mask if they don’t want to (or that Covid is a real threat) and clashes with mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The two men have history involving Lou and Joe is fired up enough to run for office against his romantic rival, leaning into NRA/MAGA sentiments and further losing his rag when Lou brings home a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler) and gazes at him in a way she hasn’t looked at her husband in many moons. Suddenly, this is no longer a movie in the vein of John Sayles’ Lone Star and takes an Asterian turn to something darker, more febrile and explosively ludicrous. As Aster films go, it’s less challenging than the big swings of Beau Is Afraid but not as startlingly fresh as Hereditary.
Peppered with as many fatalities as delicious performances, Eddington is surprisingly droll, luridly violent and has the prescience to use a Katy Perry song in a film that worries about the potential stranglehold of big tech in all aspects of life. (The proposed data bank that promises infrastructure and jobs for the area looms throughout as bellwether commentators warn of political control, ecological impact and wealth disparity.) There’s gallows humour to be found as characters declare Covid is ‘not a here problem’, espouse the virtues of Bitcoin and watch TikTok videos as news. The ranting homeless man who staggers into town at the start muttering incoherently about perceived wickedness is no longer the anomaly as ideologies burn brighter, fuelled by misinformation, frustration and ultimately, actually gasoline.
This is an accomplished cast so it’s no surprise that Phoenix holds focus despite playing an insubstantial man with shifting morals, ably supported by Pascal (stoic), Stone (fragile), Butler (scene-stealingly slithery) and Michael Ward, faultless as an ambitious sheriff department officer who becomes a pawn. Nothing so horrific as the decapitation of Hereditary, but Eddington offers a seething discomfort in recognising the start of the slip towards the dumpster-fire rolling-news reality we now live in. Which is truly terrifying.
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photography courtesy of A24
Eddington premiered at the 78th Cannes Film Festival
