“Eddington” Is a Lethally Self-Satisfied COVID Satire

“Eddington” is a slog, but a slog with ambitions—and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier chillers, “Hereditary” (2018) and “Midsommar” (2019), had their labyrinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid. Then came the ungainly “Beau Is Afraid” (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn’t seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With “Eddington,” his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic. The times grow worse and worse; must his movies follow suit?

“Eddington” cycles through genres with a deliberate yet half-distracted air, as if the very conventions of narrative have become caught in a feedback loop. The film has the dust of a Western, the snark of a satire, the violence of a thriller, the nihilism of a noir, and the bloat of an epic. It also has the stale taste of yesterday’s headlines, peering backward, as it does, to the early days of COVID-19. Aster’s subject is nothing less than the void of meaning—the morass of misinformation and irreconcilable political rancor—into which America has tumbled since the pandemic. The isolated, polarized way we live now, he insists, can be traced back to the misery of how we lived then.

For proof, look no further than Eddington, New Mexico, a fictional town of two thousand three hundred and forty-five souls. (That number will dip by the movie’s end.) A mask mandate is in effect, but several Eddingtonians prove defiant, including the sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who doesn’t realize that his asthmatic lungs have more to fear from COVID than from an N95. Joe is affable, obtuse, and easily aggrieved. He observes the slow-moving line outside a market where maskless customers are turned away, and scoffs in disbelief at such performative paranoia. The town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), firmly disagrees, placing himself and Joe on an ugly collision course. Ted is good-looking, popular, and civic-minded, which makes him, naturally, a disingenuous liberal scold. In Aster’s cynical schema, ideology is the phoniest mask of all, to be slipped on and off with frictionless ease.

Ted is running for reëlection, and his campaign ad, in one of the film’s better gags, presents Eddington as a beaming multiracial utopia. (An onlooker wonders if Black extras were shipped in for filming.) But Ted’s real agenda has nothing to do with diversity; it hinges on the promise of a vast A.I. data center that’s being built nearby. The film’s cinematographer, Darius Khondji, frames the construction site as if it were the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” looming over Eddington like an omen. What it portends, though, is the opposite of a cosmic leap forward. The rise of artificial intelligence will only hasten humanity’s inexorable decline.

Bedlam is already upon us, to judge by the sheer quantity of invective we hear and, more important, see. “Eddington” is a visual harangue—an onslaught of Facebook posts, TikTok captions, cable-news chyrons, and attack-ad slogans. The history of the present moment, it appears, will be written in a language that is imbecilic to the point of incoherence, and Aster has, accordingly, filled the movie with signs and blunders. “Your being manipulated,” an anti-lockdown message booms—one of several that Joe displays after he decides to run for mayor against Ted. Joe’s decision infuriates his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), the latest setback in a marriage that already looks starved of joy. If something immediately feels off about “Eddington,” it’s how wasted Stone is in this role, whose delicate sadness Aster seems uncertain whether to ridicule or dramatize.

Louise has a hushed, scandal-tinged history with Ted, and she fears not only that their secrets will be dragged back into the open but that Joe himself, in a misguided lust for revenge, will be doing the dragging. That political positions are often a cover for petty jealousy and one-upmanship is hardly news, but Aster inflates the idea into a governing thesis. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, anti-police protests reach as far as Eddington, and only a fool would assume the young activists charging into the fray are as pure of motive as they claim. For every Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), a tireless proponent of Black Lives Matter, there’s also a Brian (Cameron Mann), a tireless proponent of getting into Sarah’s pants. So dedicatedly horny is Brian that he becomes remarkably eloquent about anti-racism—a development that Aster regards as proof of just how easily, and mindlessly, the language of social justice can be co-opted.

Anthony Fauci, Hillary Clinton, George Floyd, George Soros, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kyle Rittenhouse, hydroxychloroquine, Bitcoin, Antifa—“Eddington” references all these and more, as if to position Aster as a nonpartisan provocateur. Why, then, given such a range of targets, is it the conviction of the young and woke that stings him into comic rebuke? The tell comes when Brian lectures his family on what it means to dismantle whiteness, setting up his father to deliver the script’s idea of a knockout punch line: “Are you fucking retarded? What the fuck are you talking about? You’re white!” The self-flagellating nature of progressive activism may be ripe for mockery, but Aster goes further than just skewering the pieties of the left; he panders for reactionary laughs.

Would an “Eddington” set during a more recent wave of protests—say, those on behalf of Palestinians, or undocumented immigrants—dismiss the participants so blithely? Happily, we’ll never know; the datedness of Aster’s scenario has its uses. At any rate, the director evidently has more patience for Eddington’s right-wing fringe. In one corner skulks Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), a seductive Christian cult leader who soon has Louise under his spell. More in-your-face is Louise’s mother, Dawn, who is awash in sub-QAnon conspiracy theories, but whom Deirdre O’Connell plays with such verve that even her wildest ravings hold you oddly rapt. Most indulged of all is Joe himself, the kind of bogeyman that our headlines keep in dispiriting circulation: a white, middle-aged male with troubles at home and convenient access to firearms.

When “Eddington” premièred, at Cannes, some invoked the novels of Jim Thompson. The comparison isn’t exactly flattering; next to the unflinching nastiness of hardboiled prose, Aster’s self-satisfied japes feel decidedly over easy. Unlike, say, Nick Corey, the small-town sheriff who leaves a bloody trail through Thompson’s “Pop. 1280,” Joe is pathetically hapless. He doesn’t have Nick’s insidious way with words, or his way with women. It’s worth recalling that Phoenix played the beaten-down antihero of “Beau Is Afraid,” and Joe, though far more of a fighter, is no less thoroughly emasculated: rejected and abandoned by Louise, implicitly cuckolded by Ted, and, in one gratuitous scene, dragged naked to a toilet. Don’t ask why; it’s an Aster joint, and full-frontal humiliation comes with the territory.

It’s worth wondering, after “You Were Never Really Here” (2018) and “Joker” (2019), why we need to see Phoenix descend again into bouts of murderous violence. (The film climaxes with severed limbs, an exploding head, and conjoined blasts of gunfire and hellfire, all put across with a juvenile smirk.) But Phoenix never plays the same monster twice, and he’s attuned to the comic pathos of quieter moments. What you’ll likely remember about “Eddington” is not just Joe’s cold-eyed glare as he shoulders his rifle but also the endearing incompetence of his online campaign announcement, or the tenderness in his voice when he speaks of Louise. The trouble with Joe, then, isn’t Phoenix; it’s the conception of Joe as an ideal point of identification. Aster knows New Mexico well—he spent part of his childhood in Santa Fe—and he has spoken, in interviews, of his desire to capture a specific environment in which characters from all backgrounds could clash without judgment, and in which we could, presumably, catch a glimpse of ourselves. But why tether such a film to Joe’s perspective? If the aim is a panorama, why privilege a sociopath?

Really, the problem with “Eddington” is not that Aster judges his characters. It’s that he barely finds them interesting enough to judge, and his boredom proves infectious. What purpose is served by the figure of Joe’s deputy Michael (Micheal Ward), seemingly Eddington’s sole Black resident of note? He exists only to stoically absorb punishment from white townsfolk, whether it’s Sarah, who criticizes him for not joining a B.L.M. protest, or Guy (Luke Grimes), a fellow-deputy who turns against him overnight. Can we add Aster to the list of his tormentors? Ward is a fine actor, but the director gives him virtually nothing to play or express. He grants little more to the few Indigenous actors in the ensemble, including William Belleau, cast as Pueblo police officers from the surrounding county, who pop up on occasion to argue with Joe over jurisdictional issues. That’s a sharper, sadder joke than I think Aster intends. These men have no place in Eddington—and neither, in any meaningful sense, do we. ♦