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Eddington is a surreal nightmare/satire imagined by indie horror darling Ari Aster. I've seen all his movies at least once in theaters and greatly enjoyed the off kilter surrealism of even the much maligned Beau is Afraid, but I did not like Eddington. Set in 2020 the film seeks to capture the tensions the cultural environment of the COVID-19 Pandemic placed on us and how the resultant isolation atomized us both politically and emotionally. Aster has referred to this film as "the movie that Twitter wrote" and that during the pandemic he "was living on Twitter." and it really shows through in this film
Ok so thats what the movie is about but what is it about. Well, Eddington is a fictional small town in New Mexico which is under lockdown and mask mandates from its mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). County Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) takes issue with these restrictions and announces his candidacy for mayor. This exacerbates tensions within the community which are further exacerbated by other interpersonal tensions, the BLM movement, pedophile conspiracies, big tech encroachment via an incoming data center, and general lockdown isolation. This should all sound quite familiar to many of us who were socially and politically engaged in that period which, if we're being honest we're still in the midde of today. And that's kind of my problem with the movie. It depicts a world where everyone is scared, everyone is lying and the only possible outcome is total breakdown of society. I'm left wondering what is the value of a film like this. If it is intended to capture the feeling of being an American in the year 2020 that seems pointless as the cultural climate hasn't changed all that much in the past half a decade. If it is intended to be a warning that we are headed towards social collapse, well first off we all already know, but even if we didn't its suggestion that such a breakdown is inevitable renders it's own warning futile. If it is supposed to be a depiction of what 2020 felt like it winds up being quite narrowly focused on experiancing the world through the internet.
Earlier I said the movie really shows that writer/director Ari Aster lived on Twitter through the pandemic, and this is what I meant. Eddington (probably intentionally) depicts real world interactions as if people behaved IRL (in real life) the way they do on the internet, and people just don't. Eddington doesn't depict my experiance with 2020. I worked retail from before the pandemic up until last June. I did interact with the general public in a retail environment on a daily basis (first in a grocery store, then in a optometrist's office, and finally at a corner store) people are more empathetic and understanding than they behave in the "low context" environment of the internet. This mismatch of perspectives on the pandemic between me and Aster make the film come off as misanthropic in a way thats born of Aster's privilege in being able to self-isolate. In short none of Eddington feels authentic to me. It feels like the misanthropic rant of a terminally online doomer edgelord; an impression exacerbated by an esoteric reference to "SolidGoldMagikarp". A reference that will undoubtedly age far more poorly than the movie itself. So while the movie succeeds in depicting IRL interactions as if people behaved as they do online, that doesn't seem a useful artistic project. Of course it would be bad, we know that we're on the internet and if we're not then the message is completely incoherent
So I've talked alot about the movie but said almost nothing about the movie; I almost don't want to but I probably should, cause maybe you might want to see the misanthropic rant of a terminally online doomer edgelord, and besides we could use some positivity. The fact of the matter is Eddington is an exceedingly well made movie. Top to bottom it's Ari Aster doing what Ari Aster does. Nightmarishly surreal, and disquieting, punctuated by cynical satirical humor the film really carries on the ethos of Aster's prior films. An ethos I find very engaging. Unsurprisingly Joaquin Phoenix turns in a stellar performance. Joe Cross, like every character in the film, is totally despicable but Phoenix manages to unearth some pathos so we the audience have somthing to connect to. Pedro Pascal has the easier job doing what he does best: walking the tightrope of smuggly douchey and genuinely charming. The score has a few stand out moments where it really accentuates the building chaos. The fact the movie made me dislike it as much as it did is actually a strong point in its favor. No actual misanthropic rant of a terminally online doomer edgelord has ever managed to do that so really I can't definitively say it's a bad movie.
What I can say is that I don't recommend the movie. It's a fine piece of work that does what it sets out to do, but I can't understand why anyone would want a movie doing what it does. It succeeds as a funhouse mirror to the worst of a segment of culture during our present time. But it is neither fun nor instructive. I have no use for it; beyond it making me feel terrible. Maybe you could find some use for this pretty grotesquerie, but I certainly can't, and nor, do I think, I want to.