I’ll say this about Ari Aster’s Eddington: compared to his previous film, Beau is Afraid, it’s a restrained and conventional piece of work. It’s a messy, but illuminating satire about how, in the summer of 2020, Covid and later the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd broke the brains of Americans of various political persuasions, both on the conspiratorial right and the bleeding-heart liberal left. While it goes off the rails in the third act, like Beau, it smoothly recovers to deliver a satisfying ending. If you’re looking for shots at those in Alex Jones Land, and the people who read Ibram Kendi and internalized his thesis—just in time to quote from the book to impress girls—Eddington’s got plenty of both.
The film’s overstuffed with ideas. It’s not as insightful a pandemic story as Radu Jude’s great Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn, or as sharp an all-around satire of the modern American condition as Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East. But Eddington is a success, largely due to its attention to detail, and because, while it makes many points that have been made numerous times in the last five years, it presents them in a new and creative way.
Eddington is set in May of 2020, in the titular fictional town in New Mexico, a couple of months into the pandemic, and days after the killing of George Floyd. With an aesthetic and location that makes it something of a Western, the main driver of the plot is the clash between the town’s liberal, technocratic mayor, Ted Garcia (the era’s busiest actor, Pedro Pascal), and the town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). The latter is a Covid/mask skeptic, although he’s a moderate compared to his conspiracy-addled mother-in-law (Deirdre O'Connell).
The two men have a shared ambiguous history with Cross’ wife (Emma Stone), later complicated by the arrival of a cult leader (Austin Butler), who’s like a younger and more charismatic Alex Jones. Protests soon begin, with a young Black cop named Michael (Michael Ward, from Steve McQueen’s great Lovers Rock) caught in the middle.
I’ve no idea what Ari Aster’s politics are; he’s probably on some neighborhood of the left that’s different from that of the liberal characters in the movie. Or perhaps he’s mocking his own cohort; I could see it either way. The film isn’t going after liberalism in general, but something very specific: the way a lot of white liberals lost their minds during that period, something a lot of them would cop to with the distance of five years later, especially with post-2024 election hindsight. There’s a lot of stuff like a white woman lecturing a Black man about his participation in a racist system, or a guy googling “Angela Davis” to have an excuse to chat up a young woman who’s holding her book at a rally.
Featured throughout is the sort of online content that should be familiar from that period of history, whether it’s conspiracy YouTubes, insane TikToks, or a community Zoom meeting in which you can tell which people are the liberals and conservatives by whether or not they have their pronouns listed. This is tiresome in most movies, but here, it’s spot-on and often very funny, especially the film’s final punchline.