'Eddington' Review: Ari Aster Coughs up Another Tale of American Madness

I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on writer-director Ari Aster for making the same slipshod tales of madness four times now. After all, it’s a little crazy for me to see his first three features (Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid), think they’re kind of bad, and then sign up for his fourth. But for all of Aster’s narrative and visual ambition, his new film Eddington, shows him to be a one-trick pony. He has a shallow, exploitative read on mental illness, which he then uses as fuel for making the audience feel uncomfortable, not through any deep insights, but just a general feeling that everything is ominous and unnerving without needing to go beyond the loss of individual identity. Aster’s lack of insight or clarity makes Eddington a plodding, bland mess that wants to explore how COVID drove the country mad, but is caught between satire and parable in a haphazard attempt to examine our political moment.

Set in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, in May 2020, the film starts out from the tensions arising from the mask mandates. Local sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) doesn’t like wearing a mask, but he’s also got other problems: his wife Louise (Emma Stone) doesn’t want to be touched by him let alone have his baby; her conspiracy-obsessed mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) is now living with them; and the town’s polished mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), wants Joe to enforce mask mandates that Joe thinks are an assault on individual freedom. In a fit of pique, Joe decides to challenge Ted for mayor in the upcoming election, but the town’s problems (and various subplots) continue to balloon in COVID’s wake and the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. Running alongside everything happening with Joe is teenager Brian (Cameron Mann) seeking the affections of liberal activist Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), only to see her more into Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), much to the consternation of not only Brian but also Mike (Michael Ward), one of Joe’s deputies. Oh, and there’s also a crazy, charismatic Internet personality/cult leader (got to have a cult of some kind in an Ari Aster movie), Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who may steal Louise away from Joe.

The best idea in the 150-minute runtime of Eddington is that all national politics have now somehow become local. The Internet condensed all conflict and then heightened it, so even in a small community, there is now intense friction among its populace. Furthermore, Aster is empathetic enough to see that these political expressions tend to arise not from some cogent philosophy of government, but from personal pain that needs to be expressed. If everything is politics, and we can’t turn away from the firestorms on our front porch, then every personal issue becomes channeled through a political lens. Joe is unhappy because his wife is distant and his mother-in-law is a chore. However, the only way to express this frustration is by running for Mayor because of his animus towards Ted. For Aster, every political ideology is driven by personal need, whether it’s Joe’s loneliness, Ted’s ambition, or Sarah’s well-meaning liberalism.

Sadly, this approach quickly leads Aster into a brick wall where the film’s politics become a view-from-nowhere; a sneering look at political behavior rather than examining anything on the merits. I honestly don’t know if Aster thinks the protests over George Floyd’s death were overblown or if he thinks racial injustice in policing should be confined only to urban areas. What is clear in Eddington is that he thinks a bunch of white kids in a small town protesting police brutality is as silly as Dawn’s conspiracist ravings. There’s also a bone-deep cynicism at play where any expression of communal benefit is a thin veneer for self-gratification. Brian doesn’t care about racial injustice; he just wants to get in Sarah’s pants. Ted doesn’t care about mask mandates; he just sees them as politically useful in getting an expensive data center built nearby. Joe doesn’t care about freedom; he just wants to stick it to Ted. Noting this gap between personal desire and political will becomes an exercise in tone-policing, showing that every interaction is becoming far too fraught without ever needing to engage with whether mask mandates were important or if law enforcement is too quick to use lethal force.

These haphazard observations become even worse as Aster veers between satire and parable, unable to distinguish how these two modes tend to work in opposition to each other. Pointed satire is difficult, especially if you don’t have anything insightful to say or a keen wit to say it, so Eddington can only manage a few funny jokes as it lumbers between outsized figures engaging in various hypocrisies. If the film is a parable, then is Joe meant to be a decent man driven mad by his small world spiraling out of control? If the film is a satire, then why does a character like Joe get texture and nuance in his depiction while Mike is little more than “Black Cop?” Even if Aster is trying to make the point that the world has gone so crazy that the distinction between satire and parable has collapsed, it still makes for a limp narrative that lacks the courage of its meager convictions.

Like with his previous movies, Aster sees his characters swimming in mental illness, but it’s never something tangible or subtle. It’s always the outsider’s perspective and then chastising the audience with “Doesn’t this make you UNCOMFORTABLE?!” Whether it’s the implied mental illness of the deceased mother in Hereditary, the sister killing herself and her parents with carbon monoxide poisoning in Midsommar, or the three hours of Beau’s anxiety in Beau Is Afraid, Aster sees mental illness as a constant threat to unravel the self, and he’s working with the same tone here. Eddington opens with an unhoused man ranting and raving, not because this character is worthy of any empathy, but because it’s meant to make us uneasy. The implication is, like COVID, madness is contagious in our current climate, and it infects a vulnerable host like Joe, but because Aster lacks empathy for those suffering, he views this madness at a distance. It’s a scary specter in our lives that will inevitably lead to violence, but the gruesome violence is only a manifestation of the deeper fear of losing our identity. COVID seems like the perfect vehicle for the tension between individual autonomy and collective responsibility, but Aster only knows how to explore it in the same way as his earlier films.

If Eddington held even a modicum of compassion for its characters, then perhaps the fear of individual erasure would feel like it’s in service to more than shock value. But as with all Aster’s movies, the general sense of insanity becomes his license to throw all plotting out the window in a series of increasingly bizarre gambits that no longer follow from the world or characters he’s created. Aster’s reasoning seems to be that once the world no longer makes sense, his story doesn’t have to either, which makes for limp, irritating conclusions that are only climactic in their bombast rather than any narrative payoff. Without spoiling anything, in the third act of Eddington, Aster revamps Joe’s character to show elements of savvy and foresight that had at no point been present in the prior 100 minutes. It’s lazy screenwriting operating under the guise of escalation.

Every ambition the film may have falls painfully short when the writing is this sloppy. The film never recreates the sense of COVID’s early days beyond artificial signifiers of masks or six feet of distancing. All of its political observations are laughably banal and surface-level, divorced from any kind of larger critique of America or American history. Even when the film attempts to play in the realm of Coen Brothers-esque farce, it only gets there in fits and starts, and never with the heat-seeking precision of something like Burn After Reading or even a lesser work like Hail, Caesar! that has the confidence to make actual points rather than throw on spooky music for two-and-a-half-hours in the hope that you might feel something.

Eddington is Aster’s most frustrating work to date because there are glimpses of worthwhile ideas, and he’s got Phoenix giving another outstanding performance by providing emotional depths to his buffoonish character. Furthermore, for a country that was eager to blow past COVID and return to life as normal, we need movies that examine the crisis in thoughtful ways rather than merely highlighting the intensity of the time. But instead of wrestling with contradictions or providing a modicum of grace to any character other than Joe, Aster retreats to his shallow depictions of pervasive madness leading to violent catharsis. For Aster, no story, not even a global pandemic, is so big that it can't fit inside his narrow predilections.