Eddington

Ari Aster lobotomizes the myth of the American Cowboy

Cross Posting from Letterboxd - 5 Stars

As a certified Movie Understander and Politics Knower (both insufferable things to be) Ari Aster's Eddington falls squarely in my wheelhouse. You'll have to forgive me if this review is also a little insufferable. Part of Ari's appeal as a filmmaker is readiness to be insufferable in committing his hyper personal foibles to his movies, self-deprecating as they may be. 2023's Beau is Afraid being the peak example of this, the insufferableness is the point there, it's autobiographical in a way I found a little revolting. I've always felt all art is personal and the best art is the most personal, but there is such a thing as doing too much. A movie shouldn't be indistinguishable from a journal entry. It's the work of the artist to transmute the personal into something universal. To put it another way - I don't like it when a movie feels like the artist is actively working something out in the therapeutic sense. I like it when the "work" has already been done and we're watching the result of it. I want the movie to feel processed -- a complete thought. Eddington is a complete thought, but one that stems from a brain addled with a distinctively American case of rot.

That brain belongs to Joe Cross played by Joaquin Phoenix. If there's one thing Beau is Afraid solidified despite other criticisms it's the working relationship between Phoenix and Aster is the real deal. Their collaboration enters the pantheon for me here. John Ford had John Wayne. Scorsese has De Niro. Aster has Phoenix. Aster's high anxiety filmmaking compliments Phoenix's raw nerve, "don't touch me" style of acting. He is fascinatingly watchable in this movie and its a performance directly in conversation with his role in PTA's The Master. In both films he plays a certain kind of dim, easily manipulated, reactionary American man. Sheriff Cross is just as stupid as Freddie Quell but instead of being directly manipulated by a charismatic leader of a cult he's being driven insane by, among other things, his 2020 COVID-19 media feed.

The movie is squarely orientated in his point of view, in fact. His enemies are real and imagined and everywhere and nowhere all at once. He is the unreliable narrator of this story. We get to know Cross from the start by his impotence. He is unable to affect in anyway the world around him. The local bordering Native American tribes are more well-funded, organized (and competent) than his small 3-man police department. He is forced to wear a mask by a state mandate he doesn’t understand. He’s constantly put in his place by Ted Garcia, the Mayor of Eddington a rich, slick, corporate establishment liberal played with a Gavin Newsom-esque aplomb by Pedro Pascal. His mother-in-law (a both pathetic and menacing Deirdre O'Connell) babbles incoherently about conspiracy theories in a way we've all seen people of her generation do in recent years -- in frantic non-sequitur secondhand talking points. Her dialogue is sometimes literally hard to pick out of the sound mix and she's often talked over by other characters. She is pictured literally out of focus, in the background, and largely ignored by Joe and his wife Louise. Louise Cross, played by Emma Stone, is a young woman so fragile she could break at any moment, incapable of being physically intimate with Joe due to a traumatic past of sexual violence. She was, however, in a relationship with the mayor, a point of tension that sets them at odds in a classic Western stand-off sort of way.

All of these dynamics are exacerbated when, in true Western fashion, a stranger comes to town. In this case it's a ranting, raving, spitting and coughing drifter. The personification of Covid-19 and the outsider in general. Sheriff Joe tussles with him and loses embarrassingly and immediately reflecting his inability to deal with any crisis in his life. The virus then looms over the entire movie begging the question we all had during that terrible time - do I have it or am I paranoid? Despite all the symptomatic evidence of his sickness it’s never truly confirmed and we see no one else come down with it. He gets a test and chooses not to look at the results. If he ignores it - it’s not real. Thus his condition worsens and so does his grip on reality, and with it the films sense of reality. The classic, almost retro Western visuals of the first act - Pascal and Phoenix facing off against the backdrop of an empty street - give way to Spaghetti Western whip pans and extreme close-ups in Act 2. As the tension ramps up Act 3 becomes a manic, sprint through a darkened Eddington filled with literal antifa super soldiers full of brutal spastic violence that wouldn’t be out of place in No Country For Old Men or Unforgiven save for the uncanny sense it’s not actually happening at all. This progression through the Western genre visually ends with an epilogue that forces us to reckon with what actually happened and who’s responsible for it while also asking if it even matters at all when the result is the same.

If this feels like a lot to wade through it’s because it is. I haven’t even mentioned Austin Butler’s past life regression cult leader who lures away Louise with the promise of a sexier, edgier type of delusion. Eddington doesn’t just share its naming convention with Altman’s Nashville it echoes the madness of it. Each of its ensemble exists in their own sort disembodied reality. They believe what their phones show them more than what the people they’re with are telling them. They are not just unable to connect to the people in their community they have no desire to. Everyone in Eddington is at their breaking point in one way or another - trapped as many of us were (are) in a solipsistic bubble algorithmically designed by shadowy corporate overlords with nonsensical names. By the end one way or another Sheriff Joe Cross is lobotomized by his enemies - whether they were real or not.

It is impossible to disentangle this film from American politics, but I think it’s foolish to assign a political view to it. Ari Aster here gives us the feeling of post-Covid America which is more prescient and important. Everyone is some different brand of insane and all of us are separated by our inability to reconcile our wildly different realities. It not only makes it impossible to communicate it makes it wildly dangerous to attempt to do so. The most well-armed are the most aggrieved and the most willing to act violently on that sense of being victimized. It’s terrifying and confusing but also in a lot of ways hilarious how insane we’ve all become. Those that are actually to blame are so far removed from this fractured reality they are untouchable and ready to act for they own benefit on the opportunities presented by our state of individualized psychosis. In fact, they’re cultivating it - counting on it. Eddington is America and men like Sheriff Joe Cross are the rule, not the exception. They’re as brain broken as we all but they’re in charge and have the biggest guns. Eddington paints all this in stark relief in a way only the Western can. The way to process the movie is the same way we process any of the tragedy of the last 5 years, despite how bleak and terrible these horrors are, you gotta laugh a little.