Pan and Slam

Eddington

R 2h 28m

• Director
  • Ari Aster
• Writer
  • Ari Aster
• Stars
  • Joaquin Phoenix
  • Deirdre O’Connell
  • Emma Stone

By Jason Koenigsberg

Hindsight is 2020, one of the most clever slogans for a movie in a while and it is an appropriate tagline for Ari Aster’s new movie Eddington. Is 5 years too soon to reflect on the COVID pandemic? It may be for some because Eddington brings back a lot of the terms, news events, and emotions that people were going through during 2020 when masks were mandated, social distancing was enforced, and people were watching the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent race riots on all of their devices. It created mass hysteria around the world many would rather forget than relive. Eddington is not a pleasant experience but Ari Aster fills it up with so much humor, especially in the first half, that it is hard to not laugh at the ridiculousness this movie throws at the audience both from the headlines and from this film about a fictitious mayoral race that goes haywire.

The opening shot is bare feet walking on a road, the camera pans up to show the characters mouth and beard as he mumbles incoherently then walks past a billboard about a new Data Center that is going to be constructed. The camera holds on that and this opening shot does tie into the final shot nicely. Text appears that tells the audience the movie takes place in May of 2020. The plot involves a not so bright sheriff named Joe Cross, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who decides to run for mayor against the incumbent Ted Garcia, played by Pedro Pascal. They disagree on the face mask policy and have a few public arguments which sparks the sheriff to declare via social media that he is running for mayor. The screenplay is smart the way it reveals information naturally through the dialogue and visuals allowing us to learn they are in New Mexico. It also slowly reveals that there is a history between these two men that goes beyond just coronavirus safety procedures. They both have a history with the sheriff’s wife Louise, played by Emma Stone. Also, it is not an accident that Ari Aster made one of these characters white and the other Hispanic. The mayor’s name Ted Garcia made me think of Ted Cruz more than anyone else. The less said about the heated campaign between these two the better. Eddington is filled with surprises to the point where it feels like a stick of dynamite that could blow up at any second. Surprises happen throughout that the viewer never knows which direction the narrative will take. The whole time it is shocking its viewer it is conjuring up a lot of memories that many people may have tried to subdue during 2020. All the news about race riots and hatred for police, white privilege and the hypocrisy that was running rampant and still is as the United States is as polarized today as it was five years ago. Eddington tackles conspiracies theories like Q-Anon and issues with pedophilia that seemed to fill the news back then. One of the best scenes involves a teenager expelling his white privilege to his family in front of a closet full of guns while they eat. The father is bewildered and his reaction to what his son was lecturing about is priceless.

Ari Aster makes sure that fake news is addressed and there is a character played by Austin Butler who shows up as some sort of cult leader who preaches a lot of far fetched ideas that people believe. Eddington is also insightful into how small towns in America respond to fake news online or biased news on cable TV when that information is being pumped into their heads every waking hour. The information and data aspect ties into the opening and closing shots. It is about how news, both real and fake, instills fear in us and that fear combined with men being rejected by women can snowball into major political and cultural changes. This is reminiscent of David Fincher’s movie The Social Network (2010). Today we all have Facebook and all these social media accounts, and it may all have been started because Mark Zuckerberg was dumped by a girl he liked in college. Weak men can cause a lot of damage.

Eddington is also often hilarious and one of the funniest movies of 2025 so far. It is also the best modern western since Hell or High Water (2016). This is the first post COVID western and one of the best movies to deal with the pandemic in any manner. The ending was a bit of a letdown. Some questions go unanswered, some elements of the characters and plot are intentionally unclear, and at one point in the climax, one of the characters turns into Rambo and is shooting rapid fire machine guns. He is even shooting these guns into a mostly desolate town exactly as Stallone did as Rambo in First Blood (1982). Despite some questionable decisions like that, they no doubt provide shocks and laughs as Eddington never derails too much into lunacy and remains an intelligent satire about America during the pandemic and how it brought us to the polarizing political situation we are in now.

Ari Aster directs Eddington with a lot of long takes and tracking shots. His previous best films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019) would be categorized as horror. Here he shows that he has matured as a filmmaker and can branch out into different genres with his own unique touch. All of Ari Aster’s films deal with mental illness and how they hurt family dynamics. Eddington shows how problems that stem from mental illness were magnified during the pandemic. Joaquin Phoenix gives a great performance as usual but this character is different than we have seen him before, and Pedro Pascal, who seems to be in everything nowadays, is able to match up very well head to head in all of his scenes with Phoenix.