Ari Aster’s EDDINGTON will confirm your worst fears and provoke a few new reasons for anxiety about how the world really works. This brilliant use of microcosm as macrocosm is a brutal satire that does not permit the surcease of even nervous laughter or the respite of supernatural forces at work. No, this hell on earth is populated by demons of the human variety that no exorcism as we understand the word can alleviate. That it has the Sartre-ian touch of hell being self-service only adds to the sense of inevitable disaster.
At the center of the story is the providentially monikered Joseph Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of the eponymous small (population ~2,400) New Mexican town. He’s a decent guy with issues of personal freedom when it comes to the mandated masks in May of 2020 when it comes to asthmatics, of which he is one. Compassion motivates him both when dealing with store policies surrounding COVID, and with his wife of seven years, Lou (Emma Stone), a woman whose mental health issues stem from trauma during her teenage years. She channels her pain into art, while her mother (Deirdre O’Connell), who has come to live with them, channels her feelings of helplessness into staunch, antagonistic belief in conspiracy theories and ragging on Joe. Phoenix grounds the film and carries it along with a performance that brings infinite shades of hope and despair to this character. It is the quintessence of an existential crisis defined in sharp edges and gentle longing.
It is a fraught time for the world at large, but the tensions between Joe and the town’s mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) come to a head just as a proposed water-consuming data center is being pushed through the city council during a drought, and George Floyd is murdered, bringing the Black Lives Matter protests to sleepy Eddington, as well as the cabal of forces that actually run the world. The story, which never ceases to be a personal one that follows Joe through a mayoral run and a breakdown caused by forces outside his control, becomes a perfect metaphor, from literal dumpster fires to power brokers who never tip their hands as their minions do the actual dirty work of reflexively keeping the population in line. It’s not the real power that slaps Joe when he is attempting to do his duty, but that power is the one who watches him with condescension as he makes his exit.
In the course of that process, we in the audience will have our wokeness questioned as riddles of who is manipulating whom transcend the smokescreen of racism carefully kept in place by the cabal with smoke, mirrors, and media coverage designed to inflame rather than inform. Spoiler alert: the real villain is money and the power that it brings, and the complacency of a population easily bamboozled by familiar tropes and easy answers. The locals fall under the spell of media-defined wokeness. Lou falls under the spell of a charismatic conspiracy theories (and gematria enthusiast), Vernon, played with disarming smoothness by Austin Butler. All the while, questions of jurisdiction concerning the town’s neighboring Native American reservation provide a piquant descant to the action as the tribe’s authority over the land to which they’ve been relegated, and lack of power over the land from which they’ve been evicted, is nonchalantly mocked.
The film begins with EDDINGTON’s resident crazy homeless guy (Clifton Collins, Jr.) muttering about seeking perfection, and ends with a character demonizing “useless eaters” (check your Nazi buzzwords for that one). The final 30 minutes or so are a seething dialectic on the perpetual motion machine the cabal has set in place to distract the population, glossing on gun culture and good intentions mobilized via social media for ulterior motives that features Joe enduring a nocturnal life-and-death odyssey punctuated with his ragged breathing and dogged determination to find the truth. Or just stay alive. The punchline is brutal, a vicious metaphor of how we are kept in check designed to discomfit without an escape hatch and rendered all the more sinister for its reasonable plausibility. EDDINGTON is a film designed to entertain, confound, and ultimately disconcert beyond the possibility of not seeing what has been so clearly writ in blood, pain, and willful ignorance.
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