Ari Aster’s sprawling, messy, and chaotic Eddington is a flawed exercise in dualities. An unapologetically political film about the erosion of American politics that tries also to be apolitical, Eddington is the kind of film that needs judicious pruning in some spots and a lot more explanations in others. About the only person who can probably make sense out of Eddington on a granular level is Aster (Midsommar, Hereditary, Beau is Afraid), but the film he’s made is so cheeky and sarcastic that it’s doubtful if the film’s truest intentions can ever be deciphered. In the end, Eddington is a blanket overview delivered via stream of consciousness ranting that depicts the ways humanity has lost empathy, perspective, and the capacity to make decisions for itself in the age of social media, big tech, AI, crypto, conspiracy theories, bigotry, and pandemic readiness. And one has to wonder if a thinking person needs a movie to remind themselves of this. And similarly, if someone who doesn’t want to parse what all of this means will get any meaningful message out of it. Eddington isn’t uninteresting, but it’s definitely a mess.
Eddington unfolds in the titular small town, located in New Mexico. It’s 2020, the early days of the pandemic, where paranoia about COVID, mask mandates, indigenous sovereignty, and the Black Lives Matter movement are all in the forefront of the public consciousness. Seville County Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) isn’t much for wearing his mask all the time, but he’s also quick to call out hypocrites who criticize him for not donning one when they can’t properly use one themselves. Joe, an asthmatic, thinks that people who have breathing problems should be able to get their groceries and go about their days without wearing one. Kinda. That’s not very well defined, but it starts a chain of events that will lead to Joe entering into the mayoral race, pitting him against the more left leaning incumbent, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), a person that the sheriff has a lot of personal animosity towards. Ted’s former girlfriend, Louise Cross (Emma Stone), is now Joe’s wife, and the sheriff suspects Ted did something awful to her; a narrative perpetuated by Louise’s extremely online conspiracy theorist mother (Deirdre O’Connell), who lives with the couple.
Eddington is a maddening blend of the obvious and the obscure, like watching Thomas Pynchon trying to adapt Thomas Payne’s Common Sense pamphlet length polemic into a two and a half hour fictional film set during modern times, with some asides reminiscent of classic American plays like Curse of the Starving Class, Our Town, and The Rainmaker. Aster loves to pull from a variety of different cinematic influences to create unique tones, but the approach backfires on him in Eddington, which at its most basic is a “this town isn’t big enough for the two of us” western with a lot of extra emotional and political baggage, The 2020 setting is meant to showcase what a confusing, yet defining time that year was in American history, but when that sense of unpredictability is magnified by a filmmaker who wants to amplify the chaos through a number of different lenses at once, the result is a film that is constantly pulling the viewer’s direction in too many directions at once, like reliving a not long forgotten trauma that might be coming too soon for some.
Not all of those directions are bad, however. Eddington is an overthought project in every respect, but beneath all the rubble there are outstanding elements. One indignity towards a character will trigger an avalanche of other indignities; starting with the wearing of masks and rolling down the hill from there. Eddington isn’t a film that preaches to any one choir in particular, with neither Joe nor the under-utilized Ted coming across as heroic figures. The left and right in Eddington are shown as being equally susceptible to their own worst impulses, and the isolation of the pandemic leads to a furthering of social media echo chambers seeping out into the offline world, where those who shout the loudest cultivate the biggest followings.
There’s a lot of advocacy happening in Eddington at this time: Joe’s common man schtick, Ted’s desire to transform the town into a tech mecca with the construction of a massive data mining centre, Louise’s flirting with a hippy conservative cult leading blogger (Austin Butler, who I think is doing a spot on Jared Leto impersonation, in one of the film’s best performances), and a bunch of young people trying to mobilize into a local BLM protest, almost all of them white and one of them (Cameron Mann) is only there to impress a girl he likes by appearing like an ally. On their own and in certain moments of overlap, these stories are interesting, but like everyone else, they are fighting for a finite amount of airtime, and this isn’t even the half of it.
The personalities and problems faced by the denizens of Eddington are easily identifiable, but not meant to be taken with the highest degree of realism, especially in the film’s second half when Aster skews a bit more towards a conventional genre narrative. Everything here is coloured and coded by humanity’s worst impulses, and Aster hopes that the thoughtful viewer doesn’t take the bait being laid out by the characters, and stays grounded in a sense of neutrality. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe this is all a grand provocation taking the form of a bunch of overlapping rants; a world where anything you say can and will be held against you in the court of public opinion; a place where everything is taken personally because no one else knows how to approach a situation otherwise. Are we being too sensitive or not sensitive enough? And ultimately, who cares?
Therein lies the greatest issue with Eddington. In some well crafted moments, Aster allows the viewer to grapple with those questions, but in so many others Eddington comes across like a modern day listicle; yet another updating of the template Billy Joel laid out with “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” There’s not much reflection in Aster’s more didactic moments, where the writer-director rants about privilege, social media, and how people are always telling others how to live their lives via his characters. All of these are easy targets taken out with a strange blend of rage in terms of how loudly everyone shouts and kid gloves so the viewer can “do their own research,” as a lot of the characters like to say in the film. There’s a disconnect in Eddington that feels melodramatic and snarky at the same time, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out what the intent or purpose is of any of this.
I like to refer to this kind of purposeful, but unhelpful centrism as “the last sane person” routine. In real life, whenever I hear someone jumping through hoops while ranting that both the left and right wing are out of touch with the common, everyday people, there’s a lot of truth in such an argument, but it’s often delivered with a lot of vitriol that sounds confused and lost. These people don’t fit in anywhere, and will argue about anything like they are humanity’s last bastion of sanity. I like to think that everyone reading this knows exactly the kind of person that I’m talking about; someone who thinks everyone else’s ideas are wrong but their own. In that sense, Eddington is quite relatable, but it’s also taking on a futile task. Such an argument is impossible to balance. One side will always win out, negating any sense of centrism that’s trying to be achieved.
A lot of this posturing is shown through the eyes of Joe, a character who leans heavily towards the right, but has a few pronounced leftist tendencies, especially when it comes towards processing the batshit nuttiness espoused by his combative mother-in-law. Phoenix delivers one of his best performances as the emotionally wrecked and politically/educationally ill equipped lawmaker (the truck he uses to campaign is one of Aster’s best visual running gags, showing off something new from every different angle), but this is the only character that really flourishes. Stone and Pascal are doing interesting things and turning in equally fine work, but on the page, they have less to do, meaning anything great that’s happening with these characters is because the actors have willed those bits into existence. Aster is letting a good chunk of his cast down, but they sure aren’t letting the movie down.
Eddington gets a lot better around the ninety minute mark, when Aster employs a big twist that gives his unwieldy pseudo-parable a much needed shot of momentum and surprise, but it’s a long time to get there, even if the film’s final punchline is a doozy. It’s a hard film to unpack, which is good, but so much of its loudest elements are surface level observations at best, which is bad. It’s not as heavily metaphorical as Aster’s most recent effort, Beau is Afraid, which makes this a slight improvement in terms of watchability and entertainment value, but Eddington is a film where a lot less would go a long way. In short, Eddington is a lot, but only a little works.
Eddington opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, July 18, 2025.
