Eddington

EDDINGTON   ***

Ari Aster

2025

IDEA:  In late May of 2020, a disaffected sheriff decides to contest the mayorship in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico. 

BLURB:  Many years from now, if someone wanted to get a feeling for the American zeitgeist in the 2020s, Eddington might just be the exemplary representation in narrative fiction cinema from the era. Although perhaps strained in some of its appeals to “timeliness,” especially in its more stilted first half, the film is ultimately a scathing and viscerally unsettling portrait of a profoundly sick nation eating itself alive. Aster holds a magnifying glass up to much of what is deranged and broken about the US, especially as exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: rampant, targeted media disinformation and conspiracy-mongering, unchecked government corruption, non-functioning jurisprudence, and, as tragically as always, an insatiable appetite for and easy access to guns. It’s only appropriate that he should set this pitch-black satire of sociopolitical collapse within the framework of the classical Hollywood Western, with its mythological inscription of such bedrock American ideals as law, order, freedom, and individualism. Eddington pointedly and grimly undermines all of these codes; the civilizing process of the frontier is reversed as atomization and anomie replace social integration, and the white-hatted would-be hero, Sheriff Joe Cross, devolves into a feral, amoral chaos-agent who utterly fails as a man and a leader. In its harrowing last act, the film becomes not just an indictment of a society that has lost its tether to reality, but of the deeply insecure, morally feeble, and self-interested people in positions of power who exploit that fact so they can hold society captive and destroy it. There’s a lot one could take issue with in such a bold, politically fraught work, whether it’s overly broad or flippant observations (at times, the treatment of Black Lives Matter) or a defeatist sense of cynicism and misanthropy. If Eddington can get past some caveats, it’s because it’s absolutely vital to 2025, a much-needed, necessarily discomfiting, and even cathartic real-time processing of one of the US’s most cataclysmic national moments.