There was a psychological study that stated that people who habitually watched horror movies tended to bear up better during the isolation of the COVID lockdown, which might explain why I came through relatively unscathed, but it doesn’t explain what happened to Ari Aster. The director of the excellent horror films Hereditary and Midsommar has now come out with Eddington, a Western set during those bad times, and he appears to have gone somewhat deranged along with his characters. This movie played during the Cannes Film Festival last month, and its supporters are right about this: Eddington tracks the pulse of America better than most films do. However, its detractors are right about this: It’s a really good 90-minute movie that’s stuck in a 148-minute running time. That’s less good.
Joaquin Phoenix portrays Joe Cross, the sheriff of the titular New Mexico town with a population of 2,453. In May 2020, Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) has the lawman thrown out of a grocery store for refusing to wear a mask, so Sheriff Joe refuses to intervene later that night when a crazy homeless guy (Clifton Collins Jr.) enters Ted’s bar without one. The joke winds up being on Sheriff Joe, as the unhoused man tackles him and coughs and spits in his face. The sheriff’s response is to run for mayor against Ted and maintain that the county has no COVID cases, even though the vagrant’s cough only grows nastier as the movie wears on.
The mayor may be right about masking, but the movie does not make him into a clear-cut good guy. He’s being bankrolled by big corporate interests, who want to build a data server farm outside Eddington that will likely use water and electricity that the people need. This worthy point unfortunately gets buried underneath the George Floyd protests, the cops on the Indian reservation bordering the town who keep telling Sheriff Joe to mask up, Sheriff Joe’s mother-in-law from hell (Deirdre O’Connell) who keeps telling him how worthless and pathetic he is, white supremacists murdering cops while wearing Black Lives Matter gear, and a Christian cult leader (Austin Butler) who traffics in conspiracies and definitely thinks that Trump’s White House is hiding Jeffrey Epstein’s client list. With all these ideas knocking around, Aster can’t give any of them proper treatment.
As unpleasant as Sheriff Joe is, the movie would have been better off focusing on him. With his campaign flagging, Sheriff Joe calls Mayor Ted a rapist and a pedophile during a rally, which visibly appalls even the sheriff’s racist gun nut of a deputy (Luke Grimes), who’s filming the speech. It does the same to the sheriff’s wife (Emma Stone), who was previously romantically involved with Ted. She leaves her husband after the speech and posts a video on social media calling him a liar. The sheriff’s descent into paranoia and COVID denialism is compelling enough to hang the movie on, and it leads to a great sequence when an unseen gunman starts shooting at him through his living room window. Joe runs down the mountains into the town, where he enters a gun store and emerges spraying bullets at an empty street, an outstanding metaphor for the white Americans who lost their heads and came apart when the disease struck.
It concerns me that Eddington features many of the same flaws as Aster’s other post-pandemic film, 2023’s Beau Is Afraid (which also starred Phoenix). They are both bloated meditations on how fear eats the soul, with too much to say about their subject to bring it to a fine dramatic point. It seems that Aster is better at generating fear than inquiring about its psychological nature. At least, I like his movies better when they’re out to scare me. The horror framework appears to constrain him in a healthy way, forcing him to stay on task instead of being distracted by shiny tangents. He should go back to what he does best.
Eddington
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Austin Butler, and Emma Stone. Written and directed by Ari Aster. Rated R.
