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What better backdrop for a contemporary spin on the classic Western film genre than a polarized New Mexico town in the midst of the chaos produced by the COVID-19 pandemic? Ari Aster, known for his dread-inducing modern classics — most notably “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”— takes on this concept in his newest release, “Eddington.” Despite the fascinating context, Aster ultimately fails to deliver on execution, leaving us with a convoluted and somewhat meaningless disaster.
When Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) enforces a mask mandate on the residents of the desert town Eddington, he is met with resistance headed by Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). Swayed by his growing personal and professional contempt for the mayor, Sheriff Cross decides to challenge Garcia in his campaign for reelection.
While this political confrontation initially foregrounds the film’s plot, Aster’s attempt to touch on the broad slew of issues plaguing pandemic-era American society quickly convolutes it. The result is an incoherent mishmash of surface-level reproductions of every 2020 sociopolitical buzzword that fails to portray or even mention the real impact of the Trump administration on the pandemic and the country. When it does broach other real political issues, like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and far-right conspiracy theory groups, “Eddington” fails to take a stance. Perhaps it was Aster’s intention to provide only a semi-fictionalized rendering of the situation early in the pandemic without pushing any particular agenda, but in poking fun at the entire political spectrum, the film simply comes across as out-of-touch.
In particular, the film’s handling of the BLM movement feels egregiously callous. After George Floyd’s brutal murder, Eddington, like much of the United States, sees an almost instantaneous widespread call to antiracist action. The protests sparked in the town of Eddington consist largely of white teenagers whose involvement is performative at best and largely influenced by social media. While this is not an entirely inaccurate representation of social media and its ability to influence people in the context of activist movements, it reads as Aster taking on a holier-than-thou attitude, ostentatiously flaunting this mess of a movie as the paragon of activist media.
For him to utilize BLM as a central point of the film’s plot while so blatantly avoiding any mention of Trump or Make America Great Again further reinforces its hollowness. The plot then devolves into suspenseful antifa violence and incessant bloodshed, marking yet another abrupt switch in tone. At least this change in pacing was exciting enough to shock me out of confused boredom. However, in doing so, the film loses any remaining semblance of reality and ultimately succumbs to its true identity as an overexaggerated simulacrum of the serious issues that pervaded the United States in 2020.
Had “Eddington” solely focused on its COVID-19 and BLM narratives, it may have succeeded in appearing somewhat coherent, even if grossly apolitical for a film touching on such divisive issues. However, these central themes are muddled by the presence of various other issues, including gun control, deceptive social media influencers and big-tech development. In isolation, any one of these topics might have permitted a fascinating commentary, but this would have required that Aster refine the scope of this sprawling mess and take a stance, instead of merely toeing the line and avoiding anything truly thought-provoking.
For example, Sheriff Cross’s wife, Louise Cross (Emma Stone), struggles with emotional instability as a result of some vaguely mentioned trauma. Under the constant pressure of her conspiracy theorist mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), and the palpable tension in her marriage, Louise finds herself increasingly influenced by an Internet pseudo-cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), whose success relies on exploiting people’s trauma. Unfortunately this plotline is given minimal screentime or development, leaving Stone and Butler — both powerhouse actors — criminally underused. Additionally, Joaquin Phoenix does a phenomenal job portraying Sheriff Cross’s ignorance-induced evil and Pedro Pascal perfectly embodies the deceptiveness and questionable morality of a politician. Yet, similarly, their potential is suffocated by the constraints of their characters’ underdevelopment and reduction to nothing more than lazy caricatures.
Where “Eddington” succeeds the most is in its representation of how dangerous and disorienting it is for social media to be someone’s sole source of information. Various TikTok and Instagram doomscrolling sequences are interspersed throughout the film, revealing how we are relentlessly fed blinding and conflicting absurdities online. Even Eddington’s leaders succumb to the treacherous influence of this algorithm-induced extremism. “Eddington” also accurately depicts the pervasive corruption of politics by big-tech developments. Regardless of the party dominating Eddington’s politics at any given moment in the film, the tech corporate group SolidGoldMagikarp’s evil is ever-looming. This is one of the few instances in which Aster’s apoliticism is actually beneficial to the film’s message, encouraging the audience to consider the technocratic omnipresence of our own world.
After all, as flawed as it might be, “Eddington” still echoes many of the issues that dominated American society in 2020, many of them still present or even amplified today. “Eddington” had all the elements it needed to become a modern masterpiece, but Aster betrayed the film’s potential with haphazard execution, leaving us with a pompous mess that collapses under its naive attempt for greatness.