Eddington

2020 was a hell of a year. It has been both five years and several lifetimes since the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world, and it remains arguably, a collective trauma we as a species have yet to process. There have been modest attempts at trying to grapple cinematically with this epochal event, but few have grabbed the subject by its greasy horns quite as fearlessly as Ari Aster does with Eddington.

Aster’s fourth feature is yet another different tack for the filmmaker: less terrifying than the overt horrors of Hereditary and Midsommar; less inaccessibly weird than the picaresque odyssey of Beau Is Afraid. (No giant penis monsters this time, alas.) Instead it’s a heightened but recognisably real comedic satire set during the doldrums of the initial coronavirus outbreak, amid the divisions and conflicts that it sparked, and the pre-existing social and cultural fault lines that it laid bare.

Nobody is making political and cultural satire with this much insight.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Sheriff Joe Cross, the chief law-enforcement officer of the sleepy New Mexico town of Eddington. Joe cuts a somewhat pathetic figure: greeted with indifference or hostility by his conspiracy-theorist wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell); wielding limited power over his two deputies (Luke Grimes and Micheal Ward); and a stubborn anti-masker, just as Covid crests. Yet Aster is careful not to paint with too broad strokes, depicting him as a deeply misguided man concerned about human dignity.

When Joe makes a spontaneous and ill-advised campaign to run for mayor, that puts him squarely into conflict with the existing incumbent: the slick, progressive Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Aster, who grew up in New Mexico, fills the story with localised observations: how the different institutions — the sheriffs, the mayor’s office, the indigenous tribal Pueblos — sit uncomfortably next to each other. He observes, too, how pandemic regulations and Black Lives Matter protests widen the divisions — or send people towards slick hucksters like Austin Butler’s cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak. All this fed through the lens of the internet, symbolised by an enormous monolithic data centre being built in the town, leads only to a powder keg. (The director has described the film as “a Western, but the guns are phones”).

Naturally, Eddington soon descends into total farce, and even as the material openly provokes, Aster films it all with a steady hand and astounding confidence. He keeps a grip on what happens, even while his characters lose it. Not all of his swings hit — the ending may be too bizarrely ambiguous for some — but nobody is making political and cultural satire with this much insight — or chaos.