Eddington: The American Fever Dream

★★★★½

Four and a Half out of Five Stars

I don’t want to talk about Covid. You don’t want to talk about Covid. Who wants to watch a movie about Covid? 

I took a writing class a few years ago in the spring of 2022 and several of the short stories in the class mentioned people’s Covid experience. I didn’t wanna hear about it. They’re all boring and dumb and uninteresting. I didn’t and don’t want to think about it. F. Scott Fitzgerald didn’t mention the 1918 pandemic in The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway didn’t in The Sun Also Rises, though surely the experience affected them as men in their late teens. I get why. Who wants to revisit the pandemic?

Despite this, I was very excited when the teaser and trailer came out for Eddington. I am not an Ari Aster fanboy. I am not a big horror person and Beau Is Afraid did not interest me. Midsommar is an excellent film with interesting social commentary. However, a modern Western about a showdown between a sheriff and a mayor about Covid and a scene with the six feet social distancing got me quite excited and intrigued. What route would this film take? Would we get all of the insanity or only some of the insanity?

Eddington is controversial for probably many reasons, no least of which is Ari Aster’s withering satire taking aim on every single aspect of the current insane political spectrum that reached its zenith with Covid and has not abated since. Those on the Left will revel in the insane references to Bill Gates in the sheriff’s campaign materials, while balking at the skewering of the virtue signaling by the teenagers in the Black Lives Matter protests. Those on the Right will cheer on the sheriff’s protest against wearing a mask while alone in his car, while being ashamed at the display of the more conspiracy-minded elements of that coalition.

Ari Aster is an equal opportunity satirist. No one comes out unscathed, which is incredibly satisfying. None of his observations are especially novel. They’ve been said on Twitter or Reddit or Facebook thousands of times. Our current age is ludicrously easy to skewer and the hypocrisies are absolutely everywhere. However, this time it’s not some random person online that no one cares about. These observations are now mashed together in a decently-budgeted film with Hollywood stars from an indie-darling studio and a hotshot director. That matters. And it’s awesome.

In Eddington, Joaquin Phoenix stars as Joe Cross, the county’s sheriff, a put-upon middle-aged man pushed to his breaking point by the cruelty of his neighbors, the hypocrisy and sanctimony of his mayor, the aloofness of his wife, and oppression of his mother-in-law. Covid is not the main cause of his angst, but it is the match that lights him off. Phoenix can be hit or miss, but here he is excellent. With incredible melancholy, Phoenix portrays Cross as someone to be pitied and understood rather than vilified. He is insecure and misguided, but he’s our insecure, misguided protagonist. 

The actor the internet loves to hate is well-cast as the insufferable Ted Garcia, mayor of Eddington. When the well runs dry on leading man roles, Pedro Pascal could find a second wind as the hated villain in films. Wardrobe and makeup helps Emma Stone transform into the mousy, crunchy Louise Cross, wife of Phoenix’s sheriff. Deirdre O’Connell, who played the domineering mother of the Penguin in Penguin, continues her excellence in that niche as the mother-in-law who hates her son-in-law and has gone down far too many internet rabbit holes. The one wasted actor is the always excellent Austin Butler as the Vernon Jefferson Peak, an amalgamation of the internet’s conspiracy theorists, who seems to mostly serve as a plot device and a flesh and blood representation of the internet more than an actual character.

Though Eddington begins as a showdown between a sheriff and a mayor, the film takes several unexpected twists and turns into more and more uncharted territory that I will not divulge here. Though there is the tacit confirmation or endorsement of a conspiracy theory touted by President Trump and right wingers that I thought was one of the more fascinating aspects of the film.

At its core, the film is an elegy to a long past age, one that prizes goodwill towards neighbors and a human centered way of living. It is no accident that the film opens with the promise of the construction of a data center for AI and a mentally ill homeless man. The data center is promised to be a great development by the ambitious mayor, sure to provide jobs and revitalize a dying rural town with a population barely over a thousand people. Though, how many jobs does a data center actually provide? And how many townspeople could actually work at the data center? Or will it just be a blight on the landscape? The prospects are slim in rural America, but the view is always beautiful—until a data center is built. That is, unless the data center does provide jobs, but for middle and upper class people who move into the town, drive property prices up, and jettison the actual inhabitants of the town. 

And what of the homeless man? He is a gnat in the fabric of the town. Not to be aided, but to be ignored or removed from sight. He is a victim of faraway government policies and the entrenchment of self-interest that technologies like AI have helped to augment. Self-interest is part of human nature, sure, but our internet heightens everything. 

For much of the film, Phoenix’s sheriff is a well-intentioned man. He does not traffic in the insane conspiracies of his wife or mother-in-law. He’s trying to do his job and be a good man. That is, until he can’t take it anymore and has his Falling Down moment. But we are introduced to Joe Cross watching a YouTube video in his car on how to convince your partner to have a baby, which could be the true tragedy of the film and modern America. A decrease in human connection and a decrease in life.

One of the stickers on the “Joe Cross for Mayor” truck states “Your Being Manipulated.” Of course, it’s funny because he means “you’re” and he’s a dumb anti-masker. However—and this could be a crazy stretch on my part—adding a comma serves as an encapsulation of the entire film. Your Being, Manipulated. Whether it’s algorithms or AI or malicious actors or large societal forces or government policies or just human nature, our beings are all manipulated in this age.