In May 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff and mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbors are pitted against each other in Eddington, New Mexico.
In “Eddington,” director Ari Aster takes a complete departure from his horror past, embracing a new Western look and feel while remaining true to his thriller roots. While not as polarizing as his previous film, “Beau is Afraid,” “Eddington” is still likely to spark debate among the audience due to its message and graphic nature. Politically driven, methodically written, and designed to keep you on the edge of your seat, “Eddington” evolves from an intricate dramedy about the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in a small New Mexico town into a neighbor-versus-neighbor western thriller.
The film opens with down-on-his-luck Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of Eddington, NM, and mayoral incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) in a feud over the enforcement of the New Mexico mask mandate in late May of 2020. Their dispute only escalates after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, MN, sparks nationwide outcry over racial inequity, leading to protests in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and eventually Eddington. The stress of the rising tensions in Eddington and surrounding towns leads to a steep moral devolution of Cross and Garcia, making their clash spiral out of control.
While “Eddington” is an undeniably entertaining movie, the film’s message is unclear and unfocused. Aster seeks to make a punching bag out of every character and stereotype they embody, with him poking fun at those against mask mandates, politicians who don’t believe what they say, people who are easily susceptible to right-wing conspiracy theories, young left-wing adults who think they’re always the smartest one in the room, and so on. The film is clear in its messaging that there’s no “hero” or any morally good character, but while Aster is writing this from a place of critique of modern culture, it’s not clear he knows what exactly he’s mad at.
At times in the film, you’re almost left to wonder if Aster wrote this targeted explicitly at people he knows personally, and not a character written to fit into the fictional world of Eddington.
Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Sheriff Joe Cross is one of his best by far. From his first appearance in the film, he completely submerges himself into the character and delivers a performance unlike any other I’ve seen from Phoenix. Phoenix’s portrayal as Sheriff Cross is largely driven by Cross’s internal feelings and reservations about events that stress him in his life, such as issues with his wife, Lou (Emma Stone), and his mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell). His performance as Cross is a career victory lap, and his delivery as an aging man whose whole life is slowly stripped away from him plunges deep into the waters of emotional depth and insecurity.
Emma Stone, although her portrayal as Lou Cross is not as prominent in the film as Phoenix’s or Pascal’s, still delivers one of the best performances in “Eddington” with her limited screen time. A silently compelling character grappling with childhood trauma in adulthood, her obsession with conspiracy theories and internet rabbit holes slowly picks away. It unravels her as she deals with mental anguish and melancholy. Her performance alongside Austin Butler, who portrays Vernon Jefferson Peak, a cult leader recruiting across the United States, is stellar in every facet. She becomes enamoured with Peak, who recruits her by confiding in her that he had also been traumatized as a young child. While Stone only has a few minutes of screen time as a secondary character, her performance lingers and haunts all the characters involved.
The entire cast performs incredibly as individual characters, but achieves even greater success when they perform as an ensemble. Every character in “Eddington” is torn apart by the end of the film, as the stress of Mayor Garcia and Sheriff Cross’ feud, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the town and its people, takes its toll. Even if the viewer doesn’t agree with each character in the film, the actors’ performances help make it easy for the audience to empathize with them and the struggles they are going through.
One of the film’s biggest issues is its claustrophobic nature. Aster’s writing is highly ambitious, attempting to fit multiple separate plot lines into less than two and a half hours. This is not a movie you can take a bathroom or concession break in; if you leave for even five minutes, you will undoubtedly miss an essential string of dialogue or a significant plot point that would make it hard to follow the story if you skip it. Many of these plot lines are left ambiguous or simply unfinished by the time the movie ends, which makes you wonder if Aster wrote it intentionally vague or didn’t have enough time in the editing room to include a finishing scene. However, the tightness of the scenes and lack of filler are also among the film’s strengths.
While the film is dialogue-heavy, there is not one dull moment. Scenes that might bore some viewers, especially during the exposition of the characters and the worldbuilding of the town, are accompanied by a suspenseful and unsettling soundtrack and framing of the scenes that make the audience worried that things in the city will turn for the worse.
Aster’s “Eddington” is a thrilling and unnerving display of a community torn apart from the inside out. Though the message and story are tangled due to attempting to accomplish too much in a relatively short runtime, it is no doubt an extremely shocking and electrifying film.
Planting the flag as one of the first films set in the early COVID-19 era, Aster succeeds at writing a film so exhilarating that the audience won’t know if they love it or hate it by the time the curtains fall.
In Theaters Friday, July 18th
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