There’s a shot in Ari Aster’s latest feature Eddington when the protagonist, Sheriff Joe Cross, endures a moment of great public humiliation that calls to mind John Ford’s great closing shot of John Wayne in The Searchers: an open doorway, suffused with desert light, within which a man, and others, are framed. But here, the moment passes quicker than in Ford’s film, with very little accompanying magnitude; at least not anything of the sort that sends that tall, lonely figure off into the horizon.
Joaquin Phoenix, for one thing, is not John Wayne, and his Joe Cross is not the same man as Ethan Edwards, although both men are fueled by deep-seated resentment. Phoenix pitches Cross’s voice asthmatically high, almost choked, and is far less physically imposing than the Duke; more often than not, one senses Cross ineptly attempting to present himself as the sort of swaggering character Wayne would play in a John Ford picture, rather than naturally embodying it. (The scene in question being this point’s flagrant proof.) Seeing as Aster built Eddington up from the remains of a scrapped Western, the amount of references and visual homages should come as no shock to the attentive viewer, and how the writer-director molds his new creation around those conventional themes and techniques for contemporary times is certainly a major factor of its appeal.
And as divisive as Eddington has proven to be—from its rather tepid reception at Cannes to its mixed batch of reviews upon full release—perhaps the most cogent approach to unpacking the film is how Aster centers the issues of 2020s America around an examination of fraught masculinity (which its Western influence informs), particularly as it relates to anxieties over some version of social/relational emasculation. Sheriff Cross, after all, spends a great bulk of Eddington worrying about whether or not he’s been “cucked,” so to speak, and certain realizations stemming from this frustration kickstart the film’s bloody, gunfire-frenzied denouement.
The surface conflict of the film involves a campaign struggle between Cross and the incumbent mayor of the dying Southwestern town of Eddington, New Mexico, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Although he is popular among voters, the COVID-19 pandemic and its resultant mask policies (the film is set in May 2020) have garnered pushback from locals; he has also collected considerable wealth for himself by cozying up to his superiors in state government, as well as a Large Language Model developer named SolidGoldMagikarp, which is building a huge data facility near town, much to the chagrin of some of Eddington’s more environmentally conscious residents.
In steps Cross, who resents having to wear a mask, and sees such policies as draconian, citing the fact that Eddington has not a single case of COVID-19. But there is history between the two men: when they were much younger, Garcia dated Cross’s current wife, Louise (Emma Stone). There was a pregnancy soon after, and rumors concerning the paternity of the child (no longer in the picture) set Cross against the other man ever since, in spite of Garcia avowing his innocence.
But Louise, as much as Cross adores her, is unwell. She traps herself at home, crafting macabre, child-like artworks which she sells online, and sometimes refers to herself in the third person as a defense mechanism against deep psychological trauma. Her mother lives with them, and she not only regurgitates cooked-up conspiracy theories regarding the pandemic but worships Louise’s dead father, the former sheriff whom Cross replaced. His quaint, bespectacled visage stares down at the trio from a framed photograph in the living room. Louise, one senses early, does not remember him in the same light.
Then there’s Eddington’s youth, caught up in the social justice/media frenzy of George Floyd’s murder, who take to the desolate streets in protest. Brian (Cameron Mann), a nondescript white boy, is crushing on cute blond Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), who reads James Baldwin and Angela Davis and preaches about white oppression. His friend Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), the mayor’s son, sees their dynamic as an opportunity to exercise his own stab at power.
And then there’s the good-looking, charismatic spiritual leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a self-professed survivor of monstrous government elites who travels the country in a tour bus and claims that the entire national power structure is an evil, anti-Godly scheme motivated by child predation. Louise finds great meaning in his message, although her mother is perturbed by what their relationship might uncover, and Cross by the long, meaningful looks traded between them.
And then there’s the rest of the Eddington Police Department, two young men (Michael Ward and Luke Grimes), one black and the other white, blithely following whatever their sheriff commands them to do, even if it means putting the other in handcuffs; and then there is the Pueblo Police Department overseeing the Native-run neighboring town, who spend the film zealously protecting their territory, which Cross spends the film blissfully unmindful of; oh, and then there is the mentally ill vagrant Aster opens his film with, wandering in like a harbinger of ill events, who coughs and sobs about his missing daughter…
By the time the private jet, full of armed-to-the-teeth Antifa terrorists, flies into view (a la the choppers in Apocalypse Now), the viewer has been thoroughly inundated with enough buzzword-loaded dialogue, nightmarishly nostalgic reenactments of face mask debates, and tense inarticulate—or too articulate—standoffs to comprehend the scope of Aster’s ambition.
The amount of weighty, hot-button issues Aster packs into his film would be a challenge for most directors, and his decision to utilize comedic elements—so much so that Eddington is being primarily advertised as a “black comedy” or “satirical political thriller” or what have you—is a double-edged sword.
On a positive note, this lighter approach helps pace the film’s already cumbersome 149 running time, which might have felt even longer if Aster bogged the goings-on down with grim seriousness. Many of the jokes land, particularly a hilarious parody of municipal office campaign ads; and in general, some of the hysterics displayed by Eddington’s residents ought to elicit a knowing (if wincing) chuckle from those who lived and worked and struggled through that time—who didn’t have a brain-rotted family member and/or slogan-spewing schoolmate in 2020? Or 2025, for that matter?
On a technical level, the film is solidly shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji, and its sound design—effectively capitalizing on silences—is a welcome carryover from Aster’s famed horror ventures. The music by Daniel Pemberton and Bobby Krlic is serviceable, though it does nicely include some ironic pastiches of classic Western cinema.
The cast is all-around good (more specifically on that soon) although I will continue to congratulate Emma Stone’s team for helping launch her into the upper echelons, since it is by no means on account of her limited ability to disappear inside a role.
However, the wackier Eddington gets, and the more Aster wallows in his trademark darkly off-kilter scenarios, events quickly begin to lose interest; and, although the gonzo thrills of the closing act might grip the viewer’s suspense on a brute, moment-by-moment level, they are all results of rather more predictable narrative choices. The moment Jefferson Peak appears onscreen, you know he will take Louise from Cross; the moment Cross’s accusations against Ted are successfully debunked, you know he is about to go on a violent spree, etc. So while even seasoned viewers might be a little taken aback when the Antifa shooters are flown in, it is too much of a late-game, over-the-top twist to do anything but shock, and pull the viewer along for the ride.
But the bulk of why Eddington missteps is due to its protagonist—Joe Cross is simply too uninteresting a character to be stuck with for over two hours. The “Resentful Coward Turned Cowardly Killer” trope is already quite familiar, and while, as mentioned above, telegraphing his ultimate trajectory early on is not necessarily a bad move, he is made so unsympathetic and (more damningly) bland that even his most impactful actions are given little gravitas, by dint of their utter predictability. Most of this is the fault of Aster’s script, but some of the blame must be placed on Phoenix, a solid-good actor rightfully lauded for the intensity of his performances but who I’ve often found (like Stone) rather lacking in emotional range.
How Aster utilizes Cross as a representative of the male insecurities mentioned at the top, though, is apt enough—note how so many of the city’s (i.e. the country’s) conflicts stem from men claiming another man’s “possession” or men claiming a possession of theirs has been “stolen,” either imagined and/or not, immaterial and/or not—and his decision to rework elements of his scrapped Western into Eddington make for intriguing audiovisual moments, such as Cross and Garcia’s first “showdown” on Main Street. And note as well how, in the finale, Aster/Khondji slowly move their camera around Cross’s wheezing, beleaguered form, effectively nailing him to a crucible of his own paranoia.
Maybe the best idea Aster explores in Eddington is this masculine ressentiment, and how its uber-aggressive/primitive urges struggle to manifest in an increasingly pacified world made hostile to its all-too-lethal excesses; and, being so tamped, are unable to find expression in anything but the most grotesque outlets. There is a kind of meta-dynamic at play, too, between the film’s contemporary setting/issues and its Western stylizations that parallels a man like Cross’s inability to actualize himself in the way that he wishes to. He is a coward at bottom, yes, but he also holds a position that no longer carries the same potency as it did in the world of John Ford and John Wayne and duels at high noon and the beatific prairie homestead. It is the same kind of world that Cross finds himself at film’s close, infantilely impotent, basking in the glow of a plush and padded fiction.
If Aster had confined himself to this aspect of Eddington and not crammed in a whole host of “timely” topics, it would have been vastly improved. As it stands, many such ideas are presented and then ultimately dropped, thus resulting in the impression that Aster has either nothing but the most cynical say on the matter or nothing much to say at all.
Everything with the LLM corporation, for instance, seems tacked on solely to provide eerily prescient resonance rather than be developed in any substantial way. And while it can be sometimes gratifying to chuckle at the pretentious antics of emotional high schoolers (who hasn’t been there?), portraying the Black Lives Matter movement as a parade of Robin DiAngelo-level White Guilt ridiculousness falls particularly flat, especially in a film that so openly strives to be all-encompassing. It is this very striving that cannot excuse the caricaturizing of this matter, and of others, from the SJW-turned-Right Wing Podcaster Brian to pretty much every prominent female character in the film, who is shown to be some variant of nagging harpy and/or traumatized wight. Toxic masculinity, indeed.
Of course, since this is a “black comedy,” caricatures are simply to be expected, no? Sure, and are even welcome (anything for a laugh, after all), but too much about Eddington is blatantly, i.e. self-consciously, unfunny, and its ambitions too nakedly great to allow even an engaging work like Aster’s to evade serious critique.
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