Ari Aster has a Multiplicity problem. It’s not that he makes movies about the same subject – a protagonist’s powerlessness to escape the fate that a conspiracy of their family or peers has planned for them — as plenty of filmmakers spend entire careers exploring a particular theme. No, it’s that, if you ignore his short format work, Hereditary was his Michael Keaton, the template from which all his other works derive their structure, and he his funding for further features. Midsommar was the first clone, which flipped the notion of family-planned disaster on its head and portrayed that manipulation as a form of self-actualization where the “chosen” family, now a full-fledged cult from the get-go, provides fulfillment in lieu of the real’s absence. The third, Beau is Afraid, broadened the conspiracy to a conglomerate run by the protagonist’s mother, and expanded the scope outside of gothic model homes or Scandinavian plains to encompass the whole of California. It did so at the expense of thematic and stylistic coherence, pushing the hints of surrealist comedy at the margins of his last features to the forefront while he loosened his death-grip on his well-manicured shots and whittled away the background details that so many Redditors use as a high-fructose corn syrup-like substitute for depth. He also began to favor a kind of relevancy which was missing from those prior films — a need to comment on the vagaries of the moment through aesthetic impressionism (even if Beau, once titled Disappointments Blvd., sat on a shelf until he’d stacked up enough millions to get someone to greenlight it). His latest, Eddington, is a lot like Lenny, the fourth and final Keaton clone. It’s dumb, exasperating, occasionally kind of charming, and proof that the mold that these films are cast from is finally decayed enough to be discarded, along with Aster’s pretensions of being a social critic.
Eddington claims that it’s a neo-Western (it was shot in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, based, I’m guessing, on the complimentary joke the town’s name provides for the film’s subject) but it’s much closer in practice to Death to 2020, Charlie Brooker’s Netflix mockumentary that tried and failed to make light of what was truly an annus horribus. I don’t need to go over why that year lives in a certain kind of infamy, but Aster sets it at a particularly pivotal moment: Late May 2020, the eye of the cultural hurricane between the first lockdowns (if you lived in a state with lockdowns) and the first protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Yes, despite appropriating David Wojnarowicz’s Untitled (Falling Buffalos) for his poster artwork and absolutely mauling the context of that work, Eddington is more about the conspiracy stew that a society cooks up while simultaneously isolated, enraged, and terminally online than it is about relitigating COVID disputes. At its core is Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), the sheriff of the small New Mexico town that gives the film its name, and how his little life gets turned upside down when he gets a little bit of attention for doing a good deed. Joe’s home life isn’t great: his wife (Emma Stone) is suffering from an illness exacerbated by some kind of sexual trauma in her past, and his mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) has descended fully into the terminally online hellscape of conspiracy as an attempt to explain their circumstances and malaise.
The flashpoint comes one morning after he unsuccessfully tries to remove a homeless man (Clifton Collins Jr.) from a bar run by Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), the town’s mayor. He watches as one of his community members is manhandled out of a grocery store for not wearing a mask, and sees that as unjust, akin to punishing a man with starvation for a violation that isn’t even really a crime. Joe lets him in maskless, the mayor tries to talk the sheriff down, and, ultimately, when the man gets kicked out once again, Joe buys his groceries for him, refusing any payment when he asks if he can reimburse him. The guy understandably feels deeply grateful and asks Joe for a selfie, which promptly appears on the sheriff’s Facebook feed. The caption is the first praise he’s gotten in months, and it provokes Joe to do something extreme: He decides to run for mayor against Garcia, chasing that feeling for all it’s worth over the objections of his family. Garcia’s a big-business neoliberal in the pockets of a data center run by a company called solidgoldmagikarp (they’re actually “Shining Pokemon,” Ari), so Joe’s campaign naturally opposes that by going full right-wing individualist, complete with SUVs decked out in misspelled paperboard signage and the requisite amount of cynicism. Then that summer’s uprising spreads to his small town, and Joe makes some decisions that put him on the darkest possible path and, more importantly, draw the attention of very powerful people.
Eddington’s raison d’etre can be found in its back half and in the rumors of that summer: pallets of bricks left out near businesses, deep fakes, firework terrorism, professional agitators, Deep State plots, Bill Gates, the World Economic Forum, and so on and so forth. The first 75 minutes play like a hoary, mostly-inoffensive comedy (though even the meekest jokes at white liberals’ expense were enough to cause walkouts at my screening), devoid of almost any of Aster’s established style, in which Phoenix desperately tries to establish a coherent protagonist only to have his work undone by the script’s inconsistent characterization. Aster mistakes absence for subtlety, and the result is a mid-film shift that feels like what might have happened if there was a workplace shooting at Dunder-Mifflin. There’s not much of a reason for it to be this way, other than Aster knowing his audience paid for the fucked-up stuff and that they’ll throw shit at the screen if they don’t get what they want. To be clear, the fucked-up stuff is mild compared to any of his previous features — a giant cock monster is, regardless of its success as a third-act reveal, a high bar for further immature weirdness to clear — and it feels like a cop-out.
A few jokes do land, and watching Phoenix and Pascal trade immature barbs or fight over a stereo system blasting Katy Perry’s “Firework” is entertaining enough, but the anonymity that Aster feels comfortable with here is just strange for the Scorsese-endorsed poster child for the so-called human synthesis of style and substance within elevated horror. His imagery is painfully boring, his action is dull and has an oddly mixed audio track (Phoenix’s footsteps in the final shootout are perhaps the most obvious Foley work I’ve heard in a long time), and the Where’s Waldo Reddit crowd will find themselves starved for content. Aster’s decided that he’s a provocateur, having internalized the “visionary director” label as opposed to, you know, being a director with a vision. Or, for that matter, a filmmaker with a novel point to make, and I just know that, given the political nature of Eddington and its sprawl, someone will inevitably compare it to Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales, which similarly had a tepid debut at Cannes and had pretensions of being relevant.
The problem with this comparison is that Kelly’s film was relevant, if only once the era had faded far enough in the past and we’d moved on to a newer, fresher political hell (which is ironic, given that Eddington’s tagline is “Hindsight is 2020”). He hit the ugly strangeness of the Bush years on the head while they were still going on, nailing a properly apocalyptic tone while stuffing his feature with legitimately surreal humor. It is a thematically consistent work, egregiously pretentious and ambitious, and is rightfully getting the re-evaluation it deserves. Aster is at least four years too late with his observations, and I can’t totally blame him for that, given that Kelly made movies in a much slower world and wasn’t under pressure to hold up a boutique studio’s credibility as a purveyor of exotic cinematic goods. Yet there’s no risk here, either: Kelly had his career destroyed as a consequence of his chasing his vision, while Aster will suffer little to no professional consequences for his mild critiques of goofy white liberals and their loud conservative counterparts. It will be genuinely fascinating to me to see which critics trashed Rob Savage’s Dashcam, a legitimately provocative COVID feature starring a real conspiracy theorist released in the immediate aftermath of the Delta wave, and who will love this for its feints and mild jabs. It takes Annie Hardy’s mindset seriously but not literally, confronts her with something she just can’t explain away, and, importantly, never once demands that you like her.
Yet literalizing intrusive thoughts is all Aster can seemingly do as a storyteller, his filmography screaming “please for the love of god someone give me a Xan” like a pill-chasing frat boy stuck in the ER while sweating a thousand-dollar seven-leg parlay on a random KBO game. His conspiracy angle is, quite frankly, fucking boring and played out now, as he’s gotten further away from his precious diorama-of-horrors cinema and moved into messier worlds closer to reality. Does anyone really need a reminder that paranoia suffuses American life, or that our country’s only gotten worse as we’ve gotten further away from one another? That the fraying of societal bonds, the creaking failures of the government machine, the atomization of mass culture, and the hopelessness that an all-consuming loneliness engenders within the depths of one’s soul might just be why people gravitate towards the heroic-stylings, community-centric nature of conspiracy cults? Especially ones that don’t even require you to leave the house to have a starring role? I’m sure we probably do, but not from Aster, whose work only seems to degrade precipitously with each repetition. His observations are too facile and timid to have an impact, his worldview is too jaundiced to leave any room for real reflection, and he’s just too late with Eddington for it to provoke in the way he hopes it will, especially given that the entire political animus of the moment is centered around a story, satirized here, that might just be something a little less than an internet delusion.
Frankly, I don’t think he (or anyone, for that matter) believed this feature would be released into this timeline’s 2025. It’s hard to look back and laugh at the push-and-pull of five-year-old politics when you’re still being pulled by the same forces toward the event horizon and the light-stretching annihilation within the abyssal maw of a black hole.