Oh, great. This guy again.
Ari Aster had me right up until he lost me, and it’s safe to assume I’m not alone in that assessment. Aster was a landmark talent at A24, right up until Beau is Afraid yielded a massive financial loss. (Remember, this is A24 we’re talking about. A $35 million loss might be a rounding error for WB or Disney, but that’s enough to pay for two or three movies on the scale A24 produces.) Even as a producer, Aster has recently been responsible for Dream Scenario, Rumours, Sasquatch Sunset, and most recently Death of a Unicorn earlier this year — all of which were box office bombs.
More importantly, Aster’s films have gotten significantly less creepy and more depressing in recent years. Sure, Death of a Unicorn had a neat fantasy/horror/comedy hook, but it was still an environmental allegory with no nuance or insight whatsoever. Sasquatch Sunset had even less than that. Dream Scenario and Beau is Afraid were both hopelessly ignorant works of fearmongering, only making our modern existential fears even more nightmarish (Who the nine hells was asking for that?!) without anything to help understand or manage them.
So here we are with Eddington, a film set against the backdrop of the COVID-19 lockdowns. And A24 dropped it squarely in between Superman (2025) and Fantastic Four: First Steps. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
Sure enough, the film opens in May 2020, just outside the New Mexico town of Eddington, at the construction site of a data processing campus for a tech company called… ugh, “solidgoldmagikarp”. There’s that thoughtful level of nuance we’ve all come to expect from Ari Aster, folks. We’re in trouble.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, a sheriff who uses his asthma as a convenient excuse for refusing to wear a mask during COVID lockdown. So naturally, he’s no help whatsoever in keeping the peace while everyone’s scared of COVID and starting fights over masking protocols. Oh, and let’s not forget the massive data processing center getting built close by, that’s whipping up controversy even further.
Long story short, Cross decides to take matters into his own hands and run for mayor. It’s all downhill from there.
It’s bad enough that Cross is an anti-masker during COVID. It’s bad enough that he’s in law enforcement — a sheriff, no less — just before the summer of the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s bad enough that Cross’ live-in mother-in-law (Dawn, played by Deirdre O’Connell) is a conspiracy theorist nutjob mainlining whatever drivel crosses her web browser.
But the big problem here is that Cross is an idiot too stupid and small-minded to realize that he’s out of his depth. He’s a small-town cop who’s used to dealing with small-town problems. From start to finish, Cross keeps insisting that COVID doesn’t exist in Eddington and George Floyd’s murder is someone else’s problem, despite all mounting evidence to the contrary. I need hardly add that the good people of Eddington are online like everyone else, and therefore just as connected to the problems of the world. Trouble is, the people of Eddington are also stupid and small-minded small-town folk used to small-town problems, with no idea what they’re doing or talking about.
Highlights include Sarah (Amelie Hoeferle), a young activist whose anti-racist rhetoric quickly descends into self-defeating nonsense. There’s also Brian (Cameron Mann), a poor stupid teenager who doesn’t know or believe anything about social justice, but pretends to because he’s got a crush on Sarah. And then there’s Michael (Micheal Ward), a black man working as a sheriff’s deputy, who has no informed opinion whatsoever about police brutality against black men.
Time and again, the film lampoons huge global problems and their amplification on social media, by placing them in the context of a podunk town in the middle of the desert where nothing that anyone says or does really matters. Thus the film shows how ridiculous and self-destructive it is to obsess over problems one has no degree of control over, while also showing how fatally short-sighted it is to pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist on a planet dominated and connected by social media. Here’s the problem: While the filmmakers destroy both sides in effigy, they fail to suggest any kind of happy medium. Hell, Aster doesn’t seem to think any kind of happy medium exists.
It’s rather telling how the other characters — and the film itself — treats people of color. In addition to the aforementioned Michael, we’ve got the liberal tech-happy Hispanic mayor and his son (respectively played by Pedro Pascal and Matt Gomez Hidaka), and the indigenous Officer Jimenez Butterfly (William Belleau). And then there’s my personal favorite: Lodge, an incoherent vagrant, played by an unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.
These are the characters who are made to suffer. All the white characters in this movie talk a big game about how they’re supporting the community and lifting up the downtrodden. But when the chips are down, it’s the BIPOC characters who are left to suffer, and the white characters either allow it to happen or actively make it happen. It’s especially pointed how the BLM protesters are supposedly about empathy for the oppressed and underprivileged, yet there isn’t a single one of them who wants anything to do with the vagrant.
But then the filmmakers strongly imply that Lodge is the vector that finally brings COVID to Eddington. They were right on the cusp of making a coherent point about self-righteous liberal hypocrisy, then they blew it up by making the poor mindless vagrant a literal harbinger of plague. The goddamn idiots.
Speaking of foul harbingers, there’s the matter of Austin Butler’s character. He plays a cult leader who’s racked up massive social media influence and legions of followers by spouting empty feel-good drivel (“You are not a coincidence,” what the hell is that supposed to mean?!) as a cheerful alternative to all the conflicting argumentative noise of modern life. Most notably, he attracts Louise Cross (Joe’s wife, played by Emma Stone), after her own husband and the world at large fail to give her the love and stability she craves.
In short, Butler’s character is another example of a problem with no solution. It’s aggravating how this has become Aster’s M.O. ever since Beau is Afraid. Aster doesn’t even try to deconstruct or examine the world’s problems, he simply portrays them through the most demented and cynical lens imaginable. He doesn’t show the intelligence necessary to understand the world’s problems, nor does he seem curious enough to care. Aster takes the terror of the modern everyday world and puts it up on the four corners of the screen, with the underlying implication that we as a species deserve the inevitable doom of our own making.
Bad enough that we put up with this misanthropic bullshit from Adam McKay. We don’t need this shit from Adam McKay on shrooms.
I will say this about Eddington: It’s not boring. Ari Aster doesn’t make boring films, and he’s uncommonly good at conjuring an oppressive atmosphere of paranoia. Unfortunately, it’s upsetting and concerning how his films keep getting progressively worse. Yes, this film is even worse than Beau is Afraid — it’s got all of the paranoid fearmongering and none of the uniquely trippy visuals.
It’s disappointing and frankly shameful how Aster makes films about how stupid we are for being so paranoid in these dark times, only to encourage such behavior with his dark, paranoid, stupid movies. I might add that being so cynical and fatalistic directly undercuts the work being done by activists and intellectuals who are actively looking for solutions, even as they’re getting ridiculed by willfully ignorant fuckers like Aster.
Quit complaining about the problem, Ari — you’re part of the problem now. Take your empty, self-defeating, fearmongering bullshit and go away until you’ve got something we can use.