Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal Descend into Covid-Era Madness in ‘Eddington’

Who out there is eager to revisit the hairy, scary first few months of the pandemic, where fights over masks and lockdowns mingled with nationwide protests of police brutality? That is the fiery war zone director Ari Aster plunges us back into in his new film Eddington, a nasty and erratic satire that premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on May 16.

The film begins in strangely laidback fashion, rambling through a small New Mexico town in May of 2020 as it introduces us to a cast of shaggy characters who are mostly just trying to get by. I say surprising because in his past three films—Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid—Aster started things with a bang. Here he eases us in, almost to the point of tedium. There are mild jokes skewering the rules and neuroses of that time—squabbles over masks in a place where no infection yet exists; the sneakily dangerous pablum of social media hooting to us from our phone screens—but none are particularly energizing.

When the local sheriff, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), decides to run against the town’s smoothie mayor, Ted (Pedro Pascal), it seems that maybe Aster is headed toward an allegory for the 2020 presidential election—or our two-party system more broadly. Joe tries to rally the loonies to his anti-mask cause, while Ted is trying to make big business deals with his eye on a future in Washington. On one side, we have terminally online crazies; on the other, money-minded technocrats. American electoral politics are a worthy target, but a hard one to hit with precision.

Aster also takes aim at young social justice warriors, the largely white kids whom the film constantly mocks for their stridency and theatrical racial self-loathing. Those sorts of young people can indeed be annoying, frustratingly quick to judgment or condemnation, and clumsy in their navel-gazing. But the film is as tough on them, if not tougher, as it is on anyone from the other side—conspiracy theorists and anti-science nuts whose ideas and actions carry with them much more immediate threat to other people. Aster needn’t have made some staunchly pro-progressive film, but Eddington does at times come awfully close to equating Trumpism with leftism, a common rhetorical tactic used by some of the worst pundits in this country. It’s a false equivalency that has led straight into our current mess—and makes me wonder how Aster might have shifted things if he’d made this film after the most recent presidential election.

Maybe nothing would have changed. Eddington gradually shifts away from the hyper topical and into a despairing, bleakly amusing look at an America prone to violent fantasy and deed, entrenched in escalating conflict, caught in a terrible entropy. When Aster finally knuckles down and ramps up the action, Eddington takes strange flight. Comparisons to No Country for Old Men have been drawn, but the film is nowhere near as somber and profound as that chilling masterpiece. Eddington is instead a comedy of pathetic rot, a film about a bad guy leveraging all the strife around him (that he has helped create) to attend to his own wants and grievances.

There’s certainly some Trumpism in there, but I don’t think Eddington is a Trump movie, really. It’s mostly a crime story adorned with political trappings. A better film would tightly synthesize the macro with the micro, but Aster instead lets them hang discordant next to one another, clanging in the desert wind. The boos I heard at the end of the press screening didn’t sound like ones of disagreement, but of dissatisfaction. Eddington’s setup promises a lot, but delivers mostly mayhem and confusion.

Then again, that feels apt enough as America struggles to reidentify—or reimagine—its purpose. Phoenix, who played a worrywart Aster stand-in in Beau Is Afraid, is adept at squalid humor like this. He ably plays a scrambling loser, complete with hacking Covid cough. Phoenix’s Joe is unpleasant to watch, which is the whole point. Pascal, meanwhile, doesn’t have much to do beyond light smarm, while Emma Stone—playing Joe’s addled wife—is handed a small and genuinely sad storyline that feels out of place in Eddington’s archness.

Credit to Aster, though, for throwing bones to the grand dames of the New York stage. Beau Is Afraid made fantastic use of Patti LuPone, while Eddington shrewdly employs the great Deirdre O’Connell as Joe’s hectoring mother-in-law, Dawn. She’s a conspiracy junkie forever urging her daughter to do her own research into wild, absurd theories about shadowy cabals doing nefarious things. (Shadowy cabals certainly do exist in this sorry country—just not the ones that people like Dawn believe in.) O’Connell gets the tone and temperament of such a person exactly right, giving the impression of a hippie faded into libertarian delusion. It’s acute and darkly funny, unlike the film’s increasingly wheezy and outsized gags about Black Lives Matter allies and indigenous politics.

Aster is allowed his pessimism, his equal opportunity offense. But his brush is perhaps too broad; nuance gives way to Bill Maherian conclusions that everyone is wrong and stupid for caring at all. Given the humanism lingering in his work, I don’t think that’s actually how Aster views the world. Eddington, though, verges on crankism; it’s a film whose anger is sourced in exasperation. It’s grimly telling that the film’s best parts are when it devolves into an anarchic shooting spree. There, maybe, is America’s terminal end: guns blazing away in a now-permanent night.

This story is part of Awards Insider’s in-depth Cannes coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the event’s biggest names. Stay tuned for more Cannes stories as well as a special full week of Little Gold Men podcast episodes, recorded live from the festival and publishing every day.

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