Weird question: Do you remember the pandemic? It wasn't that long ago that we were all waiting in lines to clear a grocery store aisle of all its toilet paper. Still, our time wearing masks and hiding inside watching The Sopranos doesn't feel like it occurred just five years ago. Honestly, it's almost a void in time that I've blocked out of my memory altogether.
Though the experience brought some truly beautiful stories about our need for human connection in the face of global tragedy, the Covid-19 era also feels like America's point of no return. The pandemic riled up all our fears about deep-web conspiracies, locked us inside to fester about anything and everything, and made us feel more isolated than ever before. So, it makes sense that a horror auteur—Hereditary and Midsommar's Ari Aster—chose to depict this specific moment in his new film, Eddington, now out in theaters. Unsurprisingly, Eddington is already one of the most divisive films of the year. After all, what's scarier and more misunderstood than our current reality?
Aster's new film captures the dread and paranoia of the Covid-19 pandemic as if it was the haunting specter terrorizing the small, fictional Southern town of Eddington, New Mexico. It's a place where everyone knows each other's names and families, until Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter protests force them to realize that they don't really know each other at all. Strangely, it's also a film that makes the audience question whether they should be shaking their heads in disbelief, or nervously laughing along with every scene.
Eddington follows the conservative sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who decides to challenge the town's neoliberal mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) in his bid for reelection. Both have their own problems at home before Covid-19 even enters the picture. Joe lives with his wife Louise (Emma Stone) and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deidre O'Connell), who are both falling prey to separate internet conspiracy rabbit holes. While Dawn berates Joe daily about how he's nowhere near the man her husband was, Louise is unable to start a family with Joe due to her unresolved history of sexual abuse as a child. Instead, Louise spends her days watching videos online from a televangelist (Austin Butler), while her mother searches the web for warnings about the virus in 2019. Meanwhile, Ted is still recovering after his wife suddenly left him and their son without a trace. He's the mayor of a town he no longer recognizes, and one that he struggles to understand.
So, when Joe and Ted argue in the supermarket over Joe's refusal to wear a mask, it's clear that the two opponents are using the mayoral race and this bizarre moment in history to simply vent out their anger on each other. Eddington isn't a film that necessarily takes sides, and it's certainly not one that is interested in sorting out right from wrong. Aster's aim was simply to capture the feeling of a moment we're still living through today.
"I wanted to make a film where everybody's alienated from each other and has lost track of a bigger world outside of themselves," Aster told IndieWire. "They only see the dimensions of the small world they believe in, and distrust anything that contradicts this small bubble of certainty. We've all been trained to see the world through certain windows, but those windows have just become stranger and stranger."
"These people, despite being a community of people, are not a community," he continued. "Despite being in the same rooms as each other, they are living on totally different planes."
Ever since Donald Trump's presidency rightly broke everyone's brains, many of our greatest filmmakers attempted—and mostly failed—to depict our new reality on screen. Don't Look Up, Adam McKay's celebrity-heavy satire, was so on the nose that it ended up saying nothing new at all. Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17 received mixed reviews due to its overtly Trumpian dictator character (played by Mark Ruffalo). Heck, even Superman's plot about immigration and foreign aggression is splitting audiences' perception of an otherwise tame superhero movie.
Eddington pulls off the impossible because its message isn't in your face. There's no speech about the need for kindness, or some villainous tyrant to overthrow. In fact, it's evident in the film that all the politics at play are a flash of loosely held beliefs mostly made up on the spot. The mayoral race is just a rage room for these two men to channel their problems at home into something that elicits applause of any kind for their actions. It's the most damning criticism that I've seen for both sides of the aisle since Trump took office—and it's also the most honest.
When I talked to Luke Grimes (who plays Officer Guy in Eddington) earlier this week, the actor told me that Aster knew how divisive the film would be from the very beginning. "If you're an extremist in any way, if you have chosen to go very far down one path or the other, you're going to be offended no matter which team you've chosen," he said. "What the movie's trying to say is that there are these corners that we've put ourselves in, and we've sort of stopped engaging with each other. There's this team mentality where these are my people, and I hate everyone else. So I feel like if you feel yourself being offended, then maybe there are some deeper questions you need to ask yourself."
Though I enjoyed Eddington, Aster's efforts to successfully capture the awful and ironic feeling of living in America today might not be appreciated until critics reappraise his work 20 years from now. There are a lot of angry people out there. It's not as easy nowadays for some of us to engage with art with our blinders off. Aster doesn't have the answers. Eddington doesn't seek to provide the answers. But it might be the only film since the pandemic that understands that the current conflict in America has deeper roots for humanity's problems than whether you vote red or blue.
If you see the film this week—or anything you enjoyed, for that matter—let me know what you think at josh.rosenberg@hearst.com.
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