“Your being manipulated.”
That misspelled slogan emblazoned on the truck of Eddington Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) sums up Ari Aster’s new movie in a nutshell: As America was seized by conspiracy theories and paranoia in the early, isolating days of the COVID-19 pandemic, we all got a little dumber. Attention spans shortened and extreme views emerged from the fray. Worse yet, those extreme opinions started to make major inroads for many in power. But does Eddington, Aster’s contemporary Western that morphs into a dark and twisted conspiracy thriller, actually have much to say about the dumbing down of America beyond that? Not really.
Eddington is Aster’s follow-up to Beau is Afraid, and like his divisive absurd comedy, it features yet another glimpse into the director’s disturbed mind. But unlike the audacious surrealism of his 2023 film — which put us at a necessary distance with its anxious hero (also played by Phoenix) — Eddington is a little too eager to buy into the conspiracy theories it’s supposedly satirizing. The result is a shallow, mean-spirited thriller that takes “internet brainrot” too far.
Taking place in May 2020, Eddington follows Phoenix’s frustrated Sheriff Joe Cross, who has started to chafe at the strict protocols that the pandemic has enforced on his small town. His already-jittery wife Louise (Emma Stone), has become even more withdrawn and focused on making and selling vaguely creepy dolls, while his shrewish mother-in-law (Deirdre O'Connell) keeps trying to sell them on the latest conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, his department has been shrunken down to just two deputies (Luke Grimes and Micheal Ward), which makes policing their small town more difficult as the rest of the world starts to seep into their small-town bubble — with movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa riling up the restless, bored youth.
Naturally, with no one to blame this escalating disorder on, Cross sets his sights on the charismatic mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is running for re-election. He has other reasons for turning his anger towards Garcia: his mother-in-law has long claimed that Garcia assaulted Louise when she was young, turning her into the anxious woman that she is now. As Cross and Garcia’s rivalry grows more intense, Cross decides to run for mayor, on a platform that mostly comes down to, you guessed it, “Your being manipulated.”
After establishing himself as a new voice of horror with Hereditary and Midsommar, Aster has found himself exploring strange new stylistic sandboxes with his last two films. And while the Kaufman-esque stylings of Beau is Afraid worked in his favor, Aster is out of his depth with Eddington’s contemporary Western. Aster’s clearest inspirations for Eddington are the Coen Brothers, especially in the farcical approach it takes to the COVID-19 pandemic and the culture of conspiracy that emerged out of 2020. The characters are all unlikable verging on downright detestable, particularly the film’s lead, Joe Cross. Cross’ antics toe the line between happy idiot and malicious antagonist, and Phoenix proves he’s Aster’s ideal muse, playing a new shade of pathetic that goes even further than his loser in Beau is Afraid. Pascal competently plays his likable, but smarmy foil, weaponizing his natural charisma to play a subtle parody of the overly-performative liberal. Stone is unfortunately not given much to do apart from act jittery, her character often overshadowed by her force-of-nature mother, played with a fierce menace by Deirdre O'Connell (who gives a performance a few notes off from her excellent turn in The Penguin). Austin Butler has a small but impactful role as Vernon, a Manson-like cult leader and internet personality who enchants Stone’s Louise. Perhaps the closest character to a good person is Micheal Ward’s Michael, the young sheriff’s trainee and lone Black resident of Eddington who provides a tiny voice of reason — though he, like many of the supporting characters, end up pawns to be moved around the plot as Cross stumbles through a conspiracy (mostly) of his own making.
Aster never feels like he’s comfortable in the Coen-esque interludes that Eddington takes. The satire is all a little obvious, and the jokes are all a little too Reddit-brained. There’s Cross gaining followers over his diatribe against masking in grocery stores, for example, or the Eddington youth getting riled up over Black Lives Matter when there’s one Black person in town. Maybe it’s because we’re still so close to those early lockdown days that the half-baked social satire feels hollow. Or maybe it’s because all the very real issues that came up under early lockdown days, especially Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 itself, are flattened to be just another part of the paranoid landscape that lockdown engendered. There’s a smart, potent movie to be made about how the pandemic broke our brains, but Aster isn’t the one to make that movie — he might be too far down the rabbit hole himself.
Eddington becomes far more interesting and bold when it takes a trip into more Lynchian territory. The film begins from an eerie POV, with the local drunk wandering through the empty streets before breaking into a bar where Pascal’s Ted Garcia is holding a campaign meeting. It’s Americana in the void, and feels like the movie that Aster originally maybe intended to make (he began the script for Eddington five years before Hereditary), and which the pandemic accelerated: a Western about the emptiness at the heart of the American dream. It’s in these surreal little touches where Aster feels more at home, but sadly these detours are simply that: detours. As a farce, Eddington, instead, feels compelled to give an answer to the conspiracies that it presents, and its answer is simultaneously disturbing and a little dumb: maybe the conspiracy theories are real.
It’s a resolution that I’m not sure Aster knows the full implications of, nor what he even means by making that so. It’s a shame because a lot of Eddington worked right up until its climactic twist, at which point, all of its farce took on a sour, mean undertone. In the end, doesn’t it undercut most of what Aster was trying to say throughout the film? What of Joe Cross’ slogan, “Your being manipulated”? In the end, his foolish, pathetic protagonist is proven right, and we’re left with a satire that isn’t much of a satire at all. It’s like the snake eating itself: at the end of the day, none of it means anything.
Eddington opens in theaters July 18.
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