Ari Aster is a destroyer of worlds. As a filmmaker and an auteur he has this immaculate ability to create worlds within a vacuum, only to destroy them afterward. In Beau is Afraid, Beau’s world crumbles, deteriorates, as does his masculinity. In Midsommar, Dani’s world is turned upside down as she confronts her mental illness, and the sunshine-laden nightmare she and her friends have set their sails in. In Hereditary, the family structure crumbles, as the sinister nature of the relationship between its members gets revealed one after the other.
Eddington is a very American movie, but it’s also universal, because societal decay exists everywhere. Especially during as divisive a time as 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its peak. This is an outsider’s review and yet the film doesn’t alienate non-Americans, but draws them to compare worlds and circumstances.
Proper introductions first, Aster once again uses Joaquin Phoenix as the center of his tormented fantasies and bizarre kink of destroying worlds. In this story, Joe Cross is a sheriff running for mayor. He’s the least likeable character of the film, no one particularly seems to care for him — not even his emotionally suppressed, traumatized wife (Emma Stone in a polarizing small role), nor his annoying, conspiracy theory-obsessed stepmother (Deidre O’Connell) — Aster is a master of creating such unlikeable characters on film.
Enter Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), everyone’s favorite mayor who is running against Joe to be reelected. Ted is no better than Joe; there are no heroes or villains in this town. The small part the town plays on the larger map of America is one of its most frustrating aspects. Everyone is getting on everyone’s nerves. Ted may be the social distancing, pro-mask face of a modern, socially aware authority, but he preaches what he doesn’t believe in, using his own son in his mayoral campaign.
So, what better time to set a film about a world in destruction than during the COVID-19 pandemic, the year that set off the events leading to current global chaos; 2020? Aster uses this sensitive period in world history to criticize everything he encounters; from people following mandates to those stubbornly rejecting them, vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, internet social activists, and online theorists on their way to become future cult leaders. The film is filled with starkly accurate portrayals of what made 2020 a nightmare in a social sense, a traumatic memory for many, including this reviewer — as beds turned to workspaces and doomscrolling became our hobby, fear and anger fueled internet rants.
One of the strongest aspects of Eddington is its character interactions, rather than the development of its plot. Joe infantilizes his wife, treating her like a child rather than attempting to understand the gravity of her trauma. The abundance of her photos on his cell phone and laptop emphasizes his infatuation with her, he is obsessed with this one connection he has, and has taken this fixation beyond the point of understanding her pain and her unhealed wounds. Louise is trapped in her own realm, unable to reveal the big scary truth of her past. Her eerie paintings and dolls are a reflection of her burdened mental state. Stone plays her vulnerability and her embryonic body language with such subtlety and wounded unhealed psyche, as if she’s leaning in on herself.
Enter the prince of darkness, Austin Butler playing one of his stunning creepy characters as usual. Vernon is an oddball, the kind of character difficult to decipher, his motives and intentions unclear, even though his trauma and his rage against the world raw and unflinching. Butler plays Vernon with such darkness and rabid intensity that it feels strange to be scared of him even when he’s opening his heart out to talk about the depth of his traumas. His connection with Louise is deeply empathetic. Butler always shines in even the smallest of roles, and Vernon solidifies him as the top talent of this generation of young Hollywood actors. He and Stone are the top acting games of this film.
What I love about Aster is that he doesn’t seek understanding or emotional connection with his films. His tales exist in a non-judgmental space, even though they’re charged with characters having sharp, dogma-like points of view. The more one sympathizes with the character, the less the other seems like a perpetrator. The disdain I have had for Ted has remained large throughout the film until the operatic, 180 turn of events in its climax. The real hero of the story, though, is Joaquin Phoenix who represents the saddest aspect of it all. The dying breed of the White Man, an emblem of the past, a decaying memory of what was once an acceptable image of manhood and machismo. In more than one instance, Joe is presented as a joke, his attempts to save everything, his image, his online presence, the mayor position, his marriage, and his sanity, are all rooted in the scary fact that he is out of time and place. He is going to be left behind and the world will move forward, progressing without him having any actual meaningful presence or placement in it.
Ari Aster’s Eddington is claustrophobic and oppressive, a modern Greek tragedy of decaying small towns. Man is no longer at odds with the gods. These are godless times and godless lands. And what man is up against is the void, the internet caricatures of what humanity is supposed to look and feel like. It doesn’t feel like Aster has made a movie for people to love or hate, but rather to observe passively and neutrally, hopefully without finding themselves in any of its tragic protagonists. Does it mirror what is happening in our crazily shifting society? Or is it simply a reckoning of an era that, while bygone, still dictates the current state of events?