"EDDINGTON" - REVIEW

Have you ever started cleaning up a mess in a neglected corner of your home, only to realize you have created a much bigger mess? I think this is what writer/director Ari Aster does each time he makes a film.

Ari Aster films are volatile, unruly, often unwieldy beasts that are simultaneously hypnotic and offputting, and he also seems to revel in pouring salt into an open wound. His latest, EDDINGTON, a modern-day western/thriller set during the summer that Covid hit, is perhaps too fresh a wound. But also, maybe not enough salt?

Immediately following our critic screening, I was exhausted. My initial gut reaction led my pencil across the comment card, as I wrote “volatile and unruly in all the wrong ways… doesn’t aim because it’s shooting blanks… an unusually unfocused disappointment… On the other hand, maybe I just need to see it again?!” The next morning, I think I loved it. A few days after that, I split the difference. Yeah, EDDINGTON is definitely one of those films. You may not fully digest, but you will most certainly chew.

This is Aster’s fourth feature film. Each subsequent film grows in bravery, boldness, sick humor and pit-of-your-stomach existential dread while simultaneously shrinking in mainstream concerns like being a crowd pleaser of any kind. In his interviews, Aster comes across as soft-spoken, self-deprecating, sweet and funny and, like the late David Lynch, who also came off that way, he uses and stretches the medium of cinema to acknowledge and exorcise demons, both personal and societal, to create the most mesmerizing fever dreams that quickly turn into nightmares that make you wish you were just falling or went to school naked instead. Often when the film ends, the dread remains.

His 2017 debut HEREDITARY explores grief through the lens of supernatural horror. His absolutely exquisite MIDSOMMAR (#7 on my Top 10 of 2019) unpacks the heartache of a break-up in progress, which coincides with a once-every-100-years Scandinavian festival and a series of disturbing pagan cult rituals, made all the more unsettling and horrific by the fact that the entire film takes place in blinding broad daylight. BEAU IS AFRAID (#8 on my Top 10 of 2023) really pushes the limits of an audience’s patience with a three-hour nightmare comedy which Aster both described as “a Jewish LORD OF THE RINGS except it’s just about a guy trying to get to his mother‘s house” and as “a video game in which your character doesn’t do anything, and none of the buttons work.“ To me, it’s A SERIOUS MAN meets AFTER HOURS, and it’s my favorite of his films.

I’m an Aster fan. As an anxious person, I find his full-throttle hellscapes to be an oddly soothing balm (I guess I have a pretty high threshold for discomfort), and I love the artfulness and inventiveness in which he works, from the sumptuous production design to the pristine camera work to the absolutely inspired casting choices (BEAU features brilliant turns by Patti LuPone, Nathan Lane, and Parker Posey, for example) to the hilarious soundtrack choices (Mariah Carey in BEAU, Katy Perry in EDDINGTON). So naturally, my expectations for his latest were pretty high. On purely expect–the–unexpected terms, my expectations were met.

EDDINGTON follows a handful of citizens of the titular, fictional New Mexico town (Aster himself is from New Mexico). Like many rural American towns these days, there seems to be more shuttered businesses than citizens to keep them going, and the offices of elected officials are no different. We follow Eddington‘s flustered, asthmatic sheriff Joe Cross (an absolutely terrific Joaquin Phoenix, imbuing his portrayal with shades beyond a right–leaning yokel caricature) who, much like the sheriffs of the Old West, is trying to keep the peace as tensions rise. There’s mostly unspoken familial tension in the home he shares with his quiet, unstable wife Louise (Emma Stone, who colors between the lines of her underwritten role) and her conspiracy theorist mother Dawn (Deidre O’Connell, ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND), all of whom stand in the shadow of Dawn‘s late husband, the former sheriff of these parts. There is bureaucratic tension in trying to keep Joe’s understaffed, underfunded sheriff’s department operating while at odds with incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal, currently in everything), seeking reelection on a progressive platform and not-so-secret ambitions to bring a data center to their desert town. Then of course, there’s the societal tension of the summer of 2020. When the film opens, citizens have been under lockdown for two months due to an infectious disease of which people have a very divided understanding, as well as the swelling racial tensions in the aftermath of George Floyd‘s murder, which propelled young white people into action through protest and anti-racist action, exponentially increasing those divisions. If that wasn’t enough movie for you, I should mention run-ins with Pueblo police (William Belleau, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON) over border disputes, and a cult leader (Austin Butler, appearing next month in Darren Arronofsky’s CAUGHT STEALING) who preys on the emotionally vulnerable, like Louise. So, with all this uncertainty and all these mounting tensions, what is Sheriff Joe to do but run for mayor himself?

EDDINGTON started as a different screenplay which, according to a recent interview with Bill Hader on the A24 podcast, Aster had tried to make even before HEREDITARY. Covid cracked the code to fill in what he felt was missing in the script at the time, but similar to where we are now in our country, the new film, which is more accessible but possibly more divisive than BEAU IS AFRAID, doesn’t add up.

Westerns typically serve as allegories, metaphors or parables for whatever modern societal issues are in focus, but played out through the daily hardships of frontier life, with the distance of a bygone era…  but there is no metaphor or allegory here, and certainly no distance. It doesn’t just state the ills of 2020 so much as it biliously regurgitates them. It often feels like being trapped in a social media comments section; an exhausting argument that just goes in a circle, about humanity’s inability to sustain impactful change for too long before slipping back into ego, strident self-satisfaction, greater fury, or just the struggles of everyday life. As it pertains to the western, then as now, it is a harder life.

Not everything in an Ari Aster film connects, not even in his best works, but that, I believe, is the point. I would still call his film successful because it helps to illustrate how disconnected we are. For me, the fact that it has a lot of ambition that feels a little slapped together is what helps it stay in your mind, and hopefully makes the viewer examine the part they play. Despite the chaos and brutality which are Aster’s stock and trade (and we get a chaotic and brutal finale), this is Aster at his most empathetic and least cruel. It feels like a plea to listen to one another even through so much noise, and how egos and a sense of superiority and “progress“ make it hard to hear one another. When we don’t have the answers, we go to art to understand what the questions are. The best art is that which considers multiple viewpoints. This film is not afraid to ask the questions. It also offers no solutions, but how could it? EDDINGTON is a deeply messy film, but it’s the type of mess that is necessary, finally addressing that neglected corner of your home, and pulling everything out to see what’s really there.

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Zach is a proud member of the Minnesota Film Critics Association (MNFCA). For more info about Zach, the organization, or to read other great reviews from other great Minnesota-based film critics, click here: https://mnfilmcriticalliance.wordpress.com/