Eddington (2025)
Sociopolitical satire by Ari Aster, director of Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau is Afraid. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, Sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico in 2020. Cross gets into a feud with mayor Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal, as Eddington is hit with Covid Regulations, which escalates into violence once the protests over the murder of George Floyd reach the town. Initially only consisting of a couple of teenagers holding up signs, it reaches its boiling point, when a suspiciously well equipped paramilitary group arrives on the scene to sow chaos, potentially connected to an unnamed tech companies planned construction of a large data center in Eddington.
One of the many things art can do is try to make sense of the world. I will say it, I was beyond excited to learn that both Hideo Kojima and Thomas Pynchon would have new releases this year, both creators greatly concerned about where we are, how we got here and what it means. Eddington is Ari Aster's attempt at making something along those lines and I was excited to see it. I like Ari Aster. I believe he's the closest contemporary American cinema has to a succesor to Kubrick, in his obsessive attention to detail as well as in his dark sense of humour and his misanthropic view on the world. Eddington is both a rather funny and a rather grim movie. It takes 2020 as a turning point in American culture and analyzes that turning point within a provincial microcosm.
Accordingly, Eddington sees people getting radicalized, attacking and killing each other, gaslighting each other and, even more so, gaslighting themselves, getting played by powers beyond their grasp and being discarded once they aren't useful anymore. The ensemble of characters Eddington presents are, for the most part, broadly speaking, caricatures. Next to Joaquin's Phoenix sense of non specific dissatisfaction turning into equally poorly defined political radicalism, there's his proto Q-Anon mother in law, his emotionally distant wife who ends up eloping with a Russell Brand style cult leader, an opportunist teenage kid who goes from BLM activist to right wing YouTuber out of sheer convenience and racist Deputy Guy who turns on his black colleague Deputy Mike at the earliest opportunity.
It's all a very Coen Brothers, very Burn After Reading style comedy of errors that, as Ari Aster films tend to, really goes off the rails in its final act, when an extended action sequence that feels right out of a Michael Mann gives way to an epilogue that's as bleak as it was inevitable. The under the surface plot of Eddington, concerning plans for the construction of the Solidgoldmagikarp data center (That name is a reference so esoteric that I understand it less the more I look it up) feeling like a sinister omen for the future. After two and a half hours of people being misled by their social media feeds, it all culminates in the opening of a facility using up untold amounts of water and electricity to power machines whose only utility it is to lie to us.
While I do think Ari Aster, as a director, gets better with every movie he makes, this doesn't quite reach the heights of Beau is Afraid artistically (although, to be fair, not the lows either). However, it is a movie I've kept thinking about since I saw it. It's not that the subject matter is all that relatable to me. I made it through the Corona Pandemic quite well. Matter of fact, please don't take this out of context, I kind of miss it. It felt like the first time that life seemed to slow down to a pace that felt manageable to me. If I had to think of a big cultural turning point where the world suddenly became frightening and incomprehensible to me I'd place it much earlier in 2015, during the refugee crisis caused by the Syrian Civil War. The pandemic, if anything, felt like a break from that. Although I am aware that that's just the European outlook. That said, a lot of the themes and events in Eddington still resonate and it still left me with quite a bit to think about.
Ari Aster has accomplished a lot over a still fairly young career. He has become one of those directors I'm always there for whenever they drop a new release because I'm genuinely interested in what they're bringing to the table. He has his share of overly personal occupations that keep cropping up in his works (most notably his obsession with controlling mothers and absent father) but he's clearly a guy who thinks and who has things to say. And Eddington is certainly a movie with things to say, even if they are rather bleak.
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