Eddington
Ari Aster's "Eddington" is a hilarious and terrifying exploration of what happens when the different information bubbles we all live in start to collide with each other, set in the days of early COVID when this kind of societal polarization seemed to pass a point of no return. It's a movie designed to provoke, not just because it skewers both "sides," but because it shines an ugly light on how susceptible we are (yes, ALL of us) to a machine that doesn't seem like it can ever be stopped, one that has us trapped in a never-ending torrent of data that has completely taken over how we relate to our fellow human beings. The online discourse about this movie will, of course, be swift, fever pitched, and appropriately divided. Aster probably wouldn't want it any other way.
Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico, a small-town conservative exasperated by all the new COVID rules and the younger generation lecturing him about Black Lives Matter. Joe gets so fed up with being shamed for not wearing a mask that he decides to run for mayor, putting himself in direct opposition with current mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a well-liked liberal whose re-election hinges on his efforts to allow a massive data center to be built on the outskirts of town. Joe doesn't think that COVID is something that is a real problem in a town like Eddington, and that most of the problems championed by liberals don't really apply in his worldview. It doesn't seem like anyone agrees with him about anything; even his depressed and increasingly estranged wife (Emma Stone) is more drawn to the mystical and divine, while his miserable live-in mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) is constantly spouting the latest Facebook conspiracies, in between telling Joe how useless he is.
Joe's pathetic mayoral campaign is mostly spent making scatterbrained Instagram reels and driving around town while ranting on a loudspeaker in his USA-decked police cruiser. It ends up inflaming different townsfolk in various ways. His wife, who he neglected to tell about his plans to run for mayor, starts running off with a smooth-talking, cult-y con artist (Austin Butler). His two deputies (Luke Grimes and Michael Ward) are enlisted to help him campaign, but are constantly at odds with each other, exacerbated by their growing racial tensions. The town's young people (who are uniformly white) start taking to the streets to protest anything and everything, constantly recording events with their phones in case (and hoping that) they get attacked by the police. In one of the movie's best running gags, a horny teen gets progressively more progressive in an attempt to impress the cute ringleader of the protests. The entire town continues to grow more and more volatile, as each group can only see the other groups as their enemies, with Joe caught in the middle of escalating chaos without a prayer of actually getting through to anybody.
Things inevitably explode into violence, and the last hour of the movie switches gears into the most American mode possible: a big ol' shootout with rapidly intensifying weaponry. We aren't talking John Wick levels of stylized shooting; this is Aster doing dark slapstick, with long shots of Phoenix panting and wheezing while running through the dark, tripping on rocks and falling down hills, all while being chased by an enemy that may or may not be right behind him. It's a surreal and often comically violent end, and one that Aster seems to think is an unavoidable conclusion to our current social situation -- running in fear from the perceived threats all around us, or even dispassionately stalked by the more silent evil lurking throughout the background, one that comes into suddenly obvious focus in the movie's final minutes.
Much of the COVID-era humor is still very funny, even if time has barely moved from what seems like so long ago. Sure, we all lived through it and certainly don't "need to be reminded," but I would argue there are some who will never be ready for a movie about this era (no judgment), and those people mostly know who they are and will avoid the movie automatically. And of course, poking fun at some easy targets is kind of the point. Aster shows how things that were very serious at the time are now super ridiculous in hindsight, providing an almost hopeful note to what is mostly a downer movie thematically. As horrible and bad as things are now, maybe the best we can hope for is to look back at this time in the not-so-far future and laugh at how stupid it all was, safe(r) in what still could be a better tomorrow. Others might argue that such serious events shouldn't be treated so casually or with such nonchalant humor -- a fair point -- but something you can almost forgive due to Aster's clear desire to provoke.
Phoenix has always been an eccentric actor on and off the screen, but he is at his best here, masterfully imbuing Joe Cross with a frantic anxiousness and oddly piteous charm that helps us relate to him (for a while anyway) even as he's doing despicable things. It's a role tailor-made for his talents, and one that I can't imagine many others in Hollywood being able to pull off. He has an easy chemistry with Pascal as his more confident and charismatic rival and a palpable sense of sadness around his tragic homelife, floating through his own home like a ghost, barely listening to the crazed mumblings of his mother-in-law (which are very humorously given a lower volume throughout).
It may be tempting to say that we don't need this kind of satire right now, or that we already have exhaustive knowledge about the evils that ail us and an almost three-hour dissertation is belaboring the point. But any reminder that all of our brains are being shaped by competing algorithms designed to pit us against each other is a worthwhile endeavor in my book. "Hindsight is 2020," as the movie's tagline reminds us. Maybe increased awareness of what is going on in the present is the only thing that will prevent us from looking back on the past with disdain.
