Film Review | ‘Eddington’ — A Masked Manic Fable

Just when you thought it was safe to make narrative assumptions and second guess plot twists, trickster auteur Ari Astor is there, ready to rearrange your brain molecules. Astor’s new oddity Eddington joins his previous films, Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid, to further establish the director as a distinctive maker of cinematic wild rides. His personalized vocabulary folds in aspects of horror and thriller genre notions, surreal touches and blackly comic attitudes. 

With Eddington, the milieu shifts even as the Aster style remains true. Setting of time and place accounts for much of this neo-Western story’s zing of alienation and dread. Eddington is a small New Mexican town with provincial insider stories gone public and festering wounds in the populace. Add to that the suddenly surreal ambience of life in the early onset of the COVID rewiring of collective reality, along with the George Floyd/Black Lives Matter uprising and awakening and a ripe recipe for volatility and potential violence. Potential turns to explosive fruition, with peculiar cinematic touches, in Aster’s hands. 

Aster seems to have found a perfect actor ally in the compellingly enigmatic Joaquin Phoenix, who played a hapless pawn in a mad world in Beau Is Afraid and now a more multi-faceted oddball in Eddington. This time out, Phoenix enacts a slowly evolving and ultimately bedazzling character shape shift trick, morphing from a fairly rational and sensitive sheriff Joe Cross, running for mayor, into a vengeful reckoning force who ends up exercising his sniper skills and, in a black comic scene late in the film, toting a mega-machine gun with über-ratatat ferocity. 

And yet even in the climactic shoot-em-up sequence of the film, a certain satirical atmosphere hovers over the old ultra-violence we’ve become inured to by action film cliches. There are strange chasms of quiet in the gunplay scene, with shadowy foes. We know some ironic high jinx are afoot when our hero is serendipitously chased into a business which happens to be a closed gun emporium. The camera lingers on the desolate building exterior, as we stew on the knowledge that Joe is inside, transforming into a “guns a blazing” kinda guy. There’s a new vicious sheriff in the body of the erstwhile mild-mannered Joe.

There is a key moment in the film when relative normality starts heading south and heading dark, not unlike the wicked shift of tone in Midsommar. It’s another one of Aster’s intriguing filmic ploys, as he plays a “fool the mind” game regarding genre and what’s allowed to happen to characters and situations we’ve been trained to empathize with. Cross is in contention with the sitting mayor Ted Garcia (played with all due oleaginous creepiness by Pedro Pascal), with one point of friction being an imagined impregnation of Cross’s wife (Emma Stone, aptly haunted and flighty). A cuckold’s fury, even when misplaced, hath fangs, and sharp-shooter skills. 

A literal slapping moment in the film sends Cross into a mute, bull-like transformation process. We know the more-or-less civil and predictable game has changed, for him, and for us, as moviegoers. A surprising postscript leads us into a future scenario resembling the unhinged tailspin of Beau Is Afraid, where everything we thought we knew was wrong, or at least filtered through an obsolete thought train. 

Astor’s films may be an acquired taste, but those of us who have acquired and signed up for his Kool-Aid parties will love Eddington. Messing up American movie formulae in search of new ideas is a dirty and not-necessary-commercial job, but somebody has to do it. Here’s to another fine and strange American underbelly head-scratcher of a flick.

View the trailer here.