When making his bid for the highest office in the land, the sharp political philosopher and crummy political candidate John Edwards famously described “two Americas.” Fittingly, when making his Film About America – and with it, his bid for auteur ascendance – Ari Aster has gone and done two “Eddingtons.” Soon to launch one thousand polemics from this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Aster’s Risqué Fantasia on National Themes begins as a surprisingly genteel send-up of pandemic-era fever-dreams before finding more audacious (and satisfying) footing by letting loose to fully embody that mania.
Sometimes it’s worth changing horses midstream.
The first in a long line of impish sight-gags begins with a simple supertitle, setting the story’s precise date to “Late May 2020.” As if we would even need to guess, what with the sea of surgical masks hiding every face but one. That would be the mug of Joaquin Phoenix, who straddles into this podunk western town as a swaggering sheriff common from all of film history, before a prolonged exposure to the CoronAster virus turns this beau febrile and afraid. Still, at first, sheriff Joe Cross seems cut from the rugged cloth that leaves part of his figure conspicuously uncovered. As a statement, you know?
Aster razzes his maverick hero with no small amount of empathy. Sheriff Joe – a name that calls to mind another, shall we say, colorful figure from American public life – might growl about mask mandates, but he’s a softie deep down; his heart belongs to his darling Louise (Emma Stone), who has little use for that or any of her husband’s organs. If Joe is lovesick, Louise and her live-in mom (Deirdre O’Connell) are patients one and zero of acute internet psychosis, exacerbated by a lockdown affording ample doom-scrolling opportunities and inflamed by their shared discovery of the QAnon-ish guru Vernon Jefferson Peak, (Austin Butler with the same greasy charm he put to good use in “Once Upon A Time in Hollywood,” and a commensurate amount of screen-time).
In “Eddington,” the personal is political, as Aster roots his main character’s ornery defiance to an unhappy domestic life, with the sheriff’s subsequent leap into the town’s municipal race a clear byproduct of Mayor Ted Garcia’s (Pedro Pascal) enigmatic history with dear Louise. But you can’t put that on a campaign poster, while the liberal mayor (one need not ask his party registration) and his goody-two-shoes public persona give the sheriff an easy target for negative-polarization.
After establishing himself as an unrestrained provocateur, willing and often eager to carve out the darkest of paths, Aster reveals his own surprising gentility throughout the film’s first half. As in his earlier horror films, “Eddington” follows the townsfolk as they clasp hands to gleefully go crazy in lockstep – with the madness here emanating from that delightful 2020 vintage of COVID restrictions, election year fervor, and, of course, civil rights protests. Only the filmmaker captures that craze with a greater degree of detachment than in prior freak-outs, treating the arid town as a kind of snow-globe, emblematic of the wider culture while fully self-contained.
Much of “Eddington” plays as light farce, layering sight-gags and funny turns-of-phrase (“deepfake from the deep-state” stands out) to skewer passion by emphasizing low-stakes. The town goes crazy with COVID fever without recording a single contagion; the local teens trade Angela Davis quotes and ponder white fragility as a form of socially distanced flirtation; and the eventual Black Lives Matter protests leave the local polity a-tizzy with fear of widespread civic destruction while resulting in about $7.49 worth of property damage.
Oh, and the only Black man in town is a cop.
Indeed, the film often channels a deeply current form of dissonance – that bemused feeling of watching the world spin into chaos while life remains ever-so mundane. In the day-to-day, and for more than just a privileged few, after all, American carnage is just a slogan from TV. Though incisive about all this, “Eddington” is also a bit schematic, playing the social satire somewhat bloodlessly. Though no doubt game and ready to let loose, Stone and Pascal aren’t given an awful lot to actually do – with both set up less as fully fledged characters than as images for Joe to pine-for or run against.
A mid-film pivot decisively changes the game, forcing Joe and his deputies to put their campaign plans on pause to focus on some real police-work. Bloodless no more, the film’s long and mordant game of bait-and-switch comes sharper into view once the tenor segues from wry farce to neo-noir to something harder to fully classify but to call it Asterian. Without giving too much away, the director basically cracks his once pristine snow-globe, allowing the rhetoric boogeymen of current political discourse to actually flow in – now lethal and real.
“Eddington” roars to life as the bodies pile up, and once the filmmaker begins riffing on deeper pathologies that long predate the recent past. That a crime site falls on the precise dividing line between state and Native American jurisdictions reframes that idea of concurrent Americas in an interesting and organic way without getting too mired in cerebral acrobatics. This is the part of the film with a bazooka, after all.
And by way of creative catharsis – listen, no one was thrilled about 2020 – “Eddington” finds greater charge enacting American carnage than just winking about it, but that should come with little surprise. Aster has always had a knack for confrontation, while Phoenix works best as an open-nerve. That the duo should prove so adept tapping into a vein of neurotic action is one of the many brutal surprises in a social satire as blunt and broad as America itself.
