REVIEW: Ari Aster Offers New Mexico By Way Of NYC In ‘Eddington’

Ari Aster is anything but content with sitting in one genre. He bobs and weaves through horror, surrealism, and now, he’s tackling dark comedy with Eddington. Released by A24, the Aster-written and directed film has a cast jam-packed with stars, including Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Michael Ward, Amélie Hoeferle, Clifton Collins Jr., William Belleau, with Austin Butler and Emma Stone.

Ari Aster’s Eddington attempts to evolve into a modern Western, mixed with a paranoid thriller set in the American Southwest, ultimately emerging as a dark comedy. Set in May 2020, the town of Eddington, New Mexico, is isolated and sheltered in place during the global COVID pandemic. The small town becomes a boiling pot for all the ills running through the nation, including a populace that is so consumed by social media that they begin to lose touch with reality. 

Social media is both Aster’s sharpest tool when it works and his most obnoxious crutch when it doesn’t. Still, with TikTok and Instagram messages driving much of the frustration in the town, Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is trying to reclaim his masculinity by taking out his frustrations on the progressive incumbent Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). 

Eddington is Ari Aster’s time capsule of small-town America in 2020.

Where Garcia is attempting to modernize the town, which includes masking, COVID recommendations, and diversity-first political ads, he’s also trying to bring a new artificial-intelligence data center. Driven by jealousy and, later, sheer anger toward Garcia, Cross begins to run for mayor, moving quickly over a few days to gain people’s attention. 

With misspelled signs on his Sheriff’s vehicle, ring-lit TikToks while “protecting the peace,” and giving erratic speeches in his car or at the local Mexican restaurant, John Cross thinks he’s tapping into a populace that’s sick and tired of being told to wear masks and accept new things. 

Ultimately, two opposing forces are clashing over the future of Eddington, New Mexico. Only the Sheriff is shadowboxing, and Ted Garcia couldn’t care less. He’s more concerned that his son can’t seem to abide by the social distancing mandates. But while Garcia couldn’t care less about what Cross tries, Cross and his household start spiraling down conspiracy rabbit holes.

Eddington is at its best when examining small-town dynamics. It thrives when we see people complaining about masks in a grocery store or how a town of 2,345 is trying to cause a protest to rival a large city, and cops are freaking out over a couple of people in the street. It’s here that Aster’s script works well to highlight the hypocrisies of people and even calls out how dumb much of the youth using activist language sounds. 

In the film’s beginning and middle, Aster makes incisive cuts through the cultural scarring we all developed during COVID. In fact, this is one of the few films that I believe effectively tackles COVID, or at least comes close to how the South Korean series Bloodhounds did. It does one thing better, which is that it also highlights the stupidity of some people. Still, for all of those good moments, in the film’s opening, as Sheriff Cross begins to break down, the film loses all grounding.

One thing is clear: while Ari Aster was vocal about speaking with cops and mayors in small-town New Mexico during the Q&A at our screening, the people he forgot were the activists. He didn’t applaud himself for speaking to activists in small towns or the people in them who cops have harassed. And it shows. While Aster’s satire is mostly humorous, the deeper Eddington goes, and most certainly by the third act, where he spirals everything into a real antifa crime spree, it feels far too shock-driven than intelligent.

Ari Aster’s fourth film is only looking at one perspective, and it suffers from it.

It’s hard to look at Eddington during the current political climate, where everyone who isn’t white in his film (of which there are always very few) is fodder for the system and either maimed or murdered. Yes, that happens in real life, but I question whether Ari Aster made this choice with that in mind. Watching a young brown boy gunned down with little pomp or circumstance, but immense empathy-building for his killer, made me want to walk out.

Eddington is satire for people who haven’t been harassed by police, who aren’t afraid for their safety now or back in 2020, and further shows how badly white creatives keep handling the Black Lives Matter movement and impact. The film’s greatest shame is how well constructed and thought-through the first two acts are. But the third act drastically brings it down and ruins the entire time capsule endeavor.

Ari Aster is capable of capturing a moment in time, and he does so with his approach to COVID in a small town. Hell, he’s even able to depict how white allyship evolved and devolved during the same period. But while both are handled well, the only part of the film that offers any empathy is when Aster trains his lens on the Q-Anon stand-ins. It’s when we see that the Sheriff’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), isn’t just joining Vernon’s (Austin Butler) cult because she believes him, but because she is deeply traumatized by a mother who refuses to confront it. 

Additionally, the constant conspiracy theories playing in the background of the Sheriff’s house ring true for anyone who has lost a loved one to brainrot racism and obsessive conspiracy theorists on the right. It’s wonderfully represented and tackled. It’s the most empathetic view of some of the worst people, but that empathy never extends to anyone else. It doesn’t extend to activists, to Black Lives Matter, or anywhere else. 

While Eddington is a product of its time, and by that I mean, a time where Ari Aster thought Trump wouldn’t win (he’s said as much during Q&As), he did. And in the wake of that, Eddington feels every bit like an East Coast lens on a small town with no grounding or understanding that they aren’t only made up of one stereotype. This is driven deeper by embracing social media speak and moments almost wholesale in a way that feels cheap. 

To put it simply, Aster’s empathy and sympathy-building starts and ends with white people, and it has to be on purpose. This isn’t a film for me, it’s a film for the white neo-lib in the New York Brownstone or Calabasas McMansion, whose only run-ins with the police are to call them on a neighborhood kid walking on their lawn.

This is just not for me. And I guess that’s the point. 2020 is a memory that is colored very differently by the color you get sorted into. If anything, Ari Aster is the kid in the film who latches onto an activist cause to get a girl, only here, it’s about keeping his auteur status. 

Eddington is unsalvageable, regardless of how good Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone’s performances are.

Eddington is Ari Aster’s worst film. It grips tightly onto social media speak and doesn’t let go, to its detriment. While loading causes and people into a woodchipper, it makes us question, well, maybe the Q-Anon people are just misunderstood and traumatized themselves, so that’s okay. 

Whatever good is done in the first two acts is thrown away to buy into its own conspiracy theories in a way that only fuels the worst in us. Eddington isn’t bad wholesale, but it does lack any perspective for the people who were the most vulnerable during the time period Aster chose to pinpoint.

While I deeply dislike the third-act choices that Aster makes as a writer and director, I can’t fault the actors. Every single actor, no matter the size of their role, is giving their absolute all. They play into the absurdity and how stupid much of the world is in its approach to most arguments. They heel-turn and develop extremely well, and in some cases, they reveal vulnerabilities that excel. They’re the reason I didn’t walk out. 

Immediately after the film, I thought “this is a film white neo-libs who can’t cut off racist and terrible family will love.” And I stand by that. But at the end of the day, born and raised in Texas, having been harassed by cops, this film was never for me. It’s for the white neo-libs and centrists whose compassion is the depth of a puddle. I can see the jokes in Eddington’s finale; I just think they’re bad and lazy. 

Eddington is playing now in theaters.