Eddington
I feel like a dickhead saying this but I rather enjoyed the advent of COVID-19. I got paid to stay home and play Animal Crossing, rent was cheap and we had the perfect excuse not to have anyone over. Social distancing measures kept strangers from sitting next to me at the movies and restrictions on gatherings meant a registry wedding with a guest list you could count on two hands was not only acceptable but responsible. Apart from all the death, despair and publicly harmful discourse, 2020 is a year I remember fondly. But it’s also a year that saw the unmistakable fracturing of society and the point of no return for human unification, a subject explored with scatterbrained hilarity in Ari Aster’s Covid Western Eddington.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico. It’s late May in 2020 and Joe has found something of an enemy in Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a progressive, tech-friendly pollie who is enforcing lockdowns and mask mandates in true State Daddy fashion. Joe disagrees with Ted’s hardline approach to the pandemic, saying it violates personal freedoms. He sees social distancing and mask requirements as arbitrary authoritarian measures and points out that the cop who tells him to wear one is himself wearing one incorrectly.
Joe’s resistance begins as an understandable response to seeing an elderly townsman kicked out of the supermarket for not wearing a mask due to breathing difficulties. He strongarms his way in and purchases the trolley of groceries for the man, painting himself as a smalltown hero facing off against The Man. Part driven by this warm feeling of heroism and part by the influence of his unstable wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her full blown conspiracy theorist nutter of a mother (Deirdre O’Connell), Joe decides on a whim to run against Ted as Mayor of Eddington. Insanity ensues.
Throughout the film’s 148 minutes you will see shoot-outs, collective panic, campaign cars riddled with grammatical errors, white-run protests for Black Lives Matter, many strains of hypocrisy, a stoush over Katy Perry’s most annoying song, the point at which being proudly misinformed entered the mainstream and some obligatory Ari Aster mother stuff. Watching Eddington is like opening Schrödinger's box and instead of finding a dead cat, finding one that’s been split into warring pieces that will never form a cat again. It’s stupid, frustrating and completely fascinating, just like life during virus time.
In that sense Eddington is similar to Aster’s previous film Beau is Afraid (initially titled Disappointment Blvd.), a piece of work that probably shouldn’t be deconstructed from a logical standpoint but instead should be appreciated (by those who are into that kinda thing) as surrealist, oedipal nightmare fuel. Eddington is similarly kitchen-sink-esque, with so many points to make it can feel like it’s making none at all. Where it succeeds is in making its audience feel as freaked out and unsure whether to laugh or be outraged as we were during the pandemic. Whether it’s a successful satire is up to you; I’m not sure it all comes together as neatly as it could, or if neatness should even be the goal. Whether Aster is skewering some of us, all of us or none of us and rather, just saying “remember this?” before breaking out into Coen-inspired carnage is up for debate. Then again, maybe it’s not a debate worth having; we already fight about so many other things.
Any hope at dissecting Eddington’s overall message lies with the poster and the brilliant tagline “Hindsight is 2020”. An homage to David Wojnarowicz’s AIDS epidemic piece “Untitled (Buffalos)”, it shows the animals plunging off a cliff to certain death in reference to the traditional Native American hunting practice. In a way it echoes the sentiments of both conspiracy theorists in Telegram groups (“this was the plan all along”) and international critics of Trump’s lacklustre response to the pandemic in allowing misinformation to spread as quickly as the virus itself. Either way, we were all so distracted that we didn’t see the cliff’s edge until it was too late.
Eddington has proved polarising, sitting at around 69% - a hair higher than Beau is Afraid - on Rotten Tomatoes. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to that rating after it’s released to a wider audience than the US considering the rest of us looked on in fascination as America ramped up its implosion. As a fan of watching pure chaos unfold onscreen I enjoyed Eddington (and Beau is Afraid, for that matter) very much. It’s very funny, Joaquin Phoenix is fabulous (as always) and Aster makes good use of the film’s hefty runtime, packing it with plenty of attention-grabbing distractions. It lacks the focus of Aster’s earlier films Hereditary and Midsommar and this is likely the reason for some viewers responding negatively. Whether you like or loathe Eddington will probably depend on how you reacted to the pandemic itself — with exasperated laughter or with angry tears.
If nothing else, Eddington is a chance to gain some perspective on where we were and where we’re headed. I write this review on my tenth day of annoyingly persistent RSV and it takes me back to when I first got Covid (a full two years after the outbreak) and finally experienced what we’d all been so wound up about. By then I’d been triple vaccinated and it was a pretty anticlimactic affair; a day and a half in bed and no smell or taste for a week. My symptoms weren’t too bad and I recovered from Covid quickly – unfortunately, I can’t say the same for society.
Verdict
☆☆☆☆
Eddington is in cinemas Thursday August 21. Grab a big ol’ thing of popcorn and enjoy the shitshow.
