2025 | rated R | starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Luke Grimes, Michael Ward, Austin Butler, Clifton Collins Jr., | written & directed by Ari Aster | 2 hrs 28 mins | 4 out of 5 stars |
It’s the summer of 2020 and the small New Mexico town of Eddington is doing its part to follow all the Covid-19 safety protocols under mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) despite the fact that the virus has yet to show up in town. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) has had enough of watching residents submit to the ritualistic humiliation of store customer limits, social distancing, mask mandates and lockdowns and decides to run against Garcia in the next mayoral election. The socially awkward and increasingly obsessive Cross starts a war that drags along his two deputies (Luke Grimes and Michael Ward) and humiliates his wife (Emma Stone). The simmer finally explodes when a racial act of police brutality from halfway across the country gets picked up by the local teenagers and turned into a city protest.
By 2025 it has only be 3 years since Covid-19 insanity swept the world and threatened to never let up. I was watching people in masks in New York City in May 2023. It was something that touched just about everyone in some way or another, if not the virus itself but the Draconian rights abuses that were gleefully carried out by politicians in the name of “slowing the spread”. It’s not a topic a lot of people can probably look at impartially. With Eddington one of the best new filmmaking voices of this decade takes on the hottest issue of the decade and I won’t lie – it put me on the edge of my seat as to what his take would be. Will it be rife with the same kind of political posturing we see on TV all the time or will Aster rise above that to make an insightful film on a radioactive subject. While I wouldn’t say Aster’s take here is impartial, his point of view is clear, but I was absolutely thrilled to see that the director of high-anxiety horror films like Hereditary and Beau is Afraid has made a movie first and a scathing piece of social commentary second.
I say Eddington is a movie first because its plot turns feel motivated by the characters and the characters are conceived by Aster to be motivated by their own selfish ends. In a lesser film, a character would support Black Lives Matter or Covid restrictions because the movie would present that as just the right thing. Here it’s because a teenager is trying to get close with a girl who is into those things, or a sheriff is acting out a personal vendetta. Those conflicting motives collide in a rich and satisfying way over the course of this long, leisurely paced and lived-in movie. Aster unfolds a new turn or tone every few minutes shifting the movie into three large parts. Part 1 feels like a golden age South Park episode that South Park no longer has the guts to make. The whole town is going crazy and the use of the town as a microcosm for the country is apparent – and very funny. I admire the hell out of how Aster boldly steps through this minefield and doesn’t care who is offended.
The shocking second act turns into a Coen brothers movie, where things spiral out of control and Aster shifts loyalties in who seemingly our protagonist is. Then the third act comes, and the bottom falls out of the movie – by that I mean it becomes a distinctly Ari Aster-esque work of high anxiety genre filmmaking that can best be compared to the third act off-the-rails nature of Beau is Afraid. Aster seems to have a lot of fun smashing his toys together but does so in the most cinematic possible way.
Each of the three acts might give one whiplash wondering where Aster is going to land on this politically, and where he does shocked me in the best possible way. The film is less focused on a back-and-forth between Cross and Garcia as much as it is interested in tracing the mental deterioration of Cross through things partly due to internet misinformation but mostly due to a selfish rot within him that this situation is bringing out. You can chalk it up to political acid-spitting, but it feels equally likely that Aster just loves abusing Joaquin Phoenix and he’s the only guy up to this challenge. Aster paints Garcia as a hypocrite and kind of a snob but he reserves all the big blows for Phoenix because he can take it and make it work. Aster’s frequently clever and occasionally laugh-out-loud script takes a chainsaw to the right and a hammer to the left, but for a side that never gets mocked or ridiculed in pop culture, that hammer is going to feel like a chainsaw.
Ultimately, Aster channels that prime South Park vibe of coming mostly down on finding a way to show everyone how they were wrong. To a point where I almost expected teenage character Brian (Cameron Mann) to stand up and tell us that he “learned something today” to quell the chaos. The real issue is bigger than these individual spats, humiliations or even Covid mandates and we’re all being manipulated. But Aster never loses the ball on keeping the film richly entertaining. That goal becomes clear in its increasingly bloody, guns-blazing finale. Keeping that eye on the story and characters is going to benefit this movie as the years go on. I feel like it feels thorny right now, and some of the jabs really sting, but Eddington feels like a movie that is built to last. This thing will age like fine wine, both as a cynical look at 2020 madness but also as a modern multi-genre western where a group of people used a crisis for their own purposes. It’s story-first and it’s one of the best movies of the year.