COVID-set 'Eddington' takes us back to a nation at a breaking point

A bad acid trip down a memory lane that a lot of folks would probably rather not revisit, writer-director Ari Aster’s pungent, fiendishly funny “Eddington” takes us back to the stir crazy quarantine summer of 2020 with a well-off New Mexico community standing in for a nation tearing itself apart. Socially distanced and roiling over mask mandates and Black Lives Matter protests — though there are notably very few Black people in town — the agitated populace of Eddington points fingers and shouts slogans, folks on all sides of every issue demonizing their friends and neighbors at the zero to 60 velocity with which arguments tended to escalate in those especially fraught days. Aster sees it as the breaking point where the country snapped off into our present, seemingly permanent derangement. As the film’s advertising tagline cheekily reminds us, “Hindsight is 2020.”

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Sheriff Joe Cross, another of the actor’s exquisite sad sacks. Asthmatic and none too bright, Joe’s stuck at home with his hectoring mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s getting lost down every internet conspiracy rabbit hole, and an increasingly withdrawn wife Louise (Emma Stone), who won’t let him touch her anymore. Joe’s supposed to be keeping order on streets overrun with rich college kids crying out for revolution, but instead spends most of his time seething about Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who may or may not have had a thing with Louise back in high school.

Fed up with the smug, handsome mayor and his mask mandates, Joe decides to run against him in an upcoming election — the race merely a proxy for their longstanding personal grudges. “Eddington” never mentions parties or political affiliations, but the gun-toting, malapropism-prone Joe is clearly coded as a MAGA guy while Pascal’s moneyed, smooth-talking hypocrisy is limousine liberalism personified. Meanwhile, there’s a tech company building an AI server farm on the outskirts of town that’s poised to be an environmental catastrophe. The company doesn’t care which candidate they have to buy, just so long as the project gets finished.

Aster’s screenplay tries to approximate the frog-in-a-boiling-pot fashion by which our country lost its mind during the pandemic, with a draggy first hour feeling like an overfamiliar index of grievances until a shocking murder sends the film spiraling out on an increasingly insane trajectory. The gasp-inducing final act won’t be spoiled here, in part because it’s so berserk you probably wouldn’t believe me if I tried. Suffice it to say, the conspiracy theory brainworms addling these characters appear to take over the movie as well — a sly example of form becoming content — with hyper-violent, bone-rattling shootouts culminating in a Kyle Rittenhouse gag that elicited from this critic a noise somewhere between laughter and a scream.

“Eddington” has something to offend (or annoy) just about everybody. The movie skewers sacred cows and picks low-hanging fruit, offering bluntly amusing sights like that of a young white girl lecturing a Black cop about systemic oppression, or Phoenix driving around with a campaign sign that reads: “Your being manipulated.” There’s a wealthy college student explaining to his father how “we need to eradicate whiteness,” and I don’t think I need to tell you what color the kid is. Aster is trying to capture all the absurdity of our recent history, and while I’m a sucker for a good land acknowledgment joke, the first hour of “Eddington” falls a little flat because so much of contemporary life is already beyond parody. It’s only when the director’s more demented instincts kick in that the film truly takes flight.

Aster made his name as a horror maestro with huge hits “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” though the latter was really more of a pitch-black breakup comedy. His most recent film, “Beau Is Afraid,” ditched the genre trappings altogether, casting Phoenix as a whimpering mama’s boy on a sicko Oedipal odyssey that ran almost a full three hours to become the world’s longest and most aggressive Jewish mother joke. I attended an advance IMAX screening of “Beau” and it was the first time I’ve ever seen audience members give back their free promotional T-shirts when the movie was over, with several critics emerging from the auditorium looking like they’d been mugged. (I named it one of 2023’s best films.)

There’s something about tormenting Joaquin Phoenix that brings out the best in Aster. Breathless, cuckolded and running for his life, Sheriff Joe Cross is a pathetic inversion of Old West archetypes for a new frontier where everyone fights with smartphones instead of six-shooters. I can’t think of an actor more adept at emasculation. A subplot finds Joe’s wife becoming obsessed with a YouTube cult guru played by Elvis Presley himself, Austin Butler. I don’t think the storyline entirely works — Stone remains an actress I admire more for her willingness to take on risky projects than her performances in them — but weeks later, I’m still cracking up thinking about Phoenix’s reactions to how offhandedly Butler humiliates him. These are the fulminations of a man coming to realize just how insignificant he is.

Much has already been made of the politics of “Eddington,” and now that the film is finally hitting theaters, I’m assuming the discourse will be dumb enough to drive me off social media for good. (A friend who saw it at a Cannes Film Festival screening said it was hard to hear some of the dialogue over the heavy sighs of performative disapproval from the press.) This is the part of the review where I’m supposed to be a Good Liberal Film Critic™ and wag my finger saying we shouldn’t joke about this stuff. I should insist there’s nothing amusing about Phoenix thinking that the movement is called “Blacks Lives Matter” and then castigate Aster for not reflecting my own personal politics, which happen to be perfect.

Except the point of the movie is how futile such displays are. The citizens of Eddington are lashing out at each other over cultural issues as a way to assert some sort of dominion in the face of larger threats they can’t control — like an airborne coronavirus or a billion-dollar tech company that’s about to ruin their water. As people discover how powerless they are, they tend to get smaller and more spiteful, using politics to reinforce petty personal resentments that already existed, tearing down their own communities while looking for purpose and in-group affirmations from idealized strangers in their phones. The film keeps coming back to images of lonely faces in quiet solitude, staring into the glow of their handheld screens.

To this, the movie offers no answers or solutions, which will probably be another knock against it from a cultural commentariat that seems to want art to be prescriptive, or at least to tell you who to root for. All Aster is arguing here — in an extended coda so ghoulishly funny it must be seen to be believed — is that the bad guys have already won.

“Eddington” is now in theaters.