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. […]
