***/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stone
written and directed by Ari Aster
by Walter Chaw The problem I have with Ari Aster movies is that Ari Aster is contemptuous of his characters. He gives them anxieties he then maximalizes into catastrophes so extreme they’re funny. (How else does a cake allergy turn into a telephone-pole beheading?) And once he creates an unbearable situation, he scoffs. It’s tempting to draw a corollary between his work and that of post-Raising Arizona Coen Brothers, but however bleak the Coen Brothers can be, however barbed their humour gets, there is always a redemptive element. Not hope, exactly, but dignity, whereas Aster’s films feel like audience punishment and only that. He’s confirmed his desire to troll: In a 2018 interview with FILM COMMENT, Aster described Hereditary as a hybrid of Peter Greenaway, whom he sees as “maybe our most authentic misanthrope,” and Douglas Sirk, whose heightened emotions and forced artificiality Aster found horrifying. His 2011 short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons was his answer to the question, “What is the worst”–as in most offensive–“thing I could make at AFI?” Aster fancies himself the great gadfly, the wizened stirrer of a pot left too long on the burner.
With 2023’s Beau is Afraid, it appeared that Aster was finally growing up, finding purpose and a message worth sharing. If agoraphobic Beau must be punished in the typical Aster style, at least he gets a Greek tragic hero’s sendoff. Beau, through his trials, becomes an everyman instead of another cosmic punching bag, and I appreciated the unexpected humanity of his journey. Rather than continuing to pump out spiritual sequels to Michael Haneke movies, Aster had delivered a spiritual sequel to After Hours. It’s the first film of his in which I found his archness, his mildly adolescent “wanna see something gross?” sense of humour, appropriate to his themes of apocalyptic wish-fulfilment. A movie made by Ford Prefect as opposed to Arthur Dent. And I thought his follow-up, Eddington, would be another step towards the Important Filmmaker status to which he has hungrily aspired. But ultimately, I’m not entirely sure what Eddington is.
Eddington might be a satire of a situation that is impossible to satirize. It’s the sort of film that could play better in five years, that hindsight could lend gravity. Perhaps with distance, it will seem less masturbatory and more profound. Popularly described as a “western,” it’s more a dystopian sci-fi in which every single conspiracy theory held by anyone in our hellscape is manifested into reality. Beau is Afraid‘s Joaquin Phoenix returns, and the fact that this most mercurial, most difficult of actors has become Aster’s muse tells its own tale. In Eddington, he’s Joe Cross, sheriff of the small New Mexico town of Eddington. He’s married to deeply troubled, bedridden shut-in Louise (Emma Stone) in the first ot several broken relationships we encounter. One day, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, Joe is publicly shamed for disregarding the town’s masking mandates; he goes viral, so to speak. This radicalizes him into running for mayor against incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who isn’t principled so much as easily swayed by popular interests and the liberal donor class. As the picture’s 2020 narrative stretches on into the BLM protests, Eddington is set up to be a microcosm of our current state of total confusion and perpetual turmoil. On the one side, the anti-masker/anti-vaxxer smooth-brained fascists; on the other, the purity-testing, self-loathing, knot-twisting nouveau-libs. The problem is that Eddington is “Devil’s Advocate: The Movie.” Not the Keanu Reeves/Al Pacino schlock classic, but rather the scripted thoughts of every blowhard who needs to interject some carefully cultivated nihilism into otherwise productive exchanges. It’s a rhetorical tactic generally deployed by the self-appointed “smartest guy in the room,” who is, of course, never the smartest guy in the room. Only idiots think the Devil needs an advocate.
Events escalate in Eddington, as events are wont to do in Aster’s oeuvre. Louise gets taken in by an Internet shaman (Austin Butler) and his traveling Kool-Aid Acid Test; political assassinations are attempted and achieved; a Black cop (Micheal Ward) is called a “traitor” and a “Nazi” and eventually accused of murder; and an Indigenous cop (William Belleau) reads tire tracks and other portents invisible to the bumbling gringos. At this point, you should probably question Ari Aster as a self-appointed sage for representation in a film that, ironically, lampoons the self-aggrandizing, self-important, beheaded-chicken gesticulations of liberal allies. After betraying affection for one of his characters in his previous film, Aster reserves the ugliest joke in Eddington for a disabled person. Whatever points are being made here are undermined by Aster’s churlish adolescence.
I have in the past likened Aster to fellow blighted-worldview-infected asshole Billy Wilder (and if you want to go there, this film is Aster’s One, Two, Three), although I wonder if the more appropriate comparison isn’t Kevin Smith: smart guys who, you know, can’t help themselves. Once the dust settles in Eddington following hails of gunfire, secret attack helicopters, and forbidden munitions, once the social safety nets inevitably fail to slow the tumble into a manmade Rapture, the whole project feels oddly futile. It’s incapable of doing much more than replicating the sensation of doomscrolling for two-and-a-half hours, but maybe that’s the point of it. Maybe Eddington is just a mirror. Not a mirror darkly, not a satire of any kind, but a frank, “Hey guys, really?” The final shot of Lord of the Flies, where these cunning masterminds at the birth of a Machiavellian authoritarian civilization are revealed to be children, held for 145 minutes. Whatever the frustrations of this film and Aster’s work in general, Eddington has a purpose. I’m just not entirely sure what that is. Probably because it’s hard to see the washing machine when you’re in the rinse cycle–which doesn’t diminish the value of black boxes buried in the wreckage of crashed airplanes. I will never watch this movie again, but I recognized myself in it–all of us in it, in all our petty ugliness. We are shaved apes covered in shit on exhibit in a compound we have made impossible to inhabit, though it’s all we’ve got. I see it. I feel his superiority to it, Aster’s: the best recognizer of the obvious, celebrated as a great filmmaker. I don’t think we should dismiss Eddington, and yet somewhere in the middle of it, I started wondering what an Ari Aster film would be like if Ari Aster didn’t write it. I’m just saying.
