The 2020 mayoral election looms heavy over the town of Eddington, NM with incumbent Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) poised to take an easy victory.  Not all in town, however, are happy with Garcia’s compliance with the governor in her enacting various Covid-19 mandates, nor with his ties to tech firm, Solidgoldmagikarp, looking to set up a massive data center nearby.  Opposition comes in the form of disgruntled sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) who announces his surprise candidacy in an online video which reignites a long simmering personal feud between the two men. 

Ari Aster delivers Eddington for A24, a modern western originally intended to be his debut film but shelved and updated to tackle Covid-era anxieties.  The writer/director brought the NYC-based distributor one of its early commercial hits and has remained loyal to the company ever since, cashing in on a debt that allows him to pursue his strangest inclinations, though this latest effort is much more traditionally structed as opposed to Beau is Afraid (2023); though do not mistake that comparison to mean that Eddington goes down easy.  For his latest effort, running 148 minutes, Aster presents a pointed political satire that plays out like machinegun fire, tearing open still-healing wounds. 

During what can almost be considered the film’s cold open which follows the mumbling and disheveled Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.) as he scuffles across the desert, Aster wastes little time in setting the time period of the film so acutely that the “May 2020” subtitle is hardly needed by the time we reach the film’s proper start.  Already there has been an altercation involving Sheriff Cross and his refusal to wear a mask at the behest of the Santa Lupe Pueblo Sheriff (David Midthunder) who is wearing his own mask under his nose.  No matter which side of the aisle one falls on the issue, the frustration and the anxieties of those early summer months of 2020 come flooding back to the front of mind; a strange and uncomfortable note to start off an almost three-hour ordeal.  From there, an altercation the next morning in the grocery store between Fred (James Cady), an elderly resident who wants to shop unmasked citing health concerns, and the store owner (Thom Rivera).  As Joe tries to diffuse the situation by berating the mask wearing shoppers, Ted steps in attempting to let cooler heads prevail and ultimately pushing Fred out without his groceries to the applause of the other residents.  Hardly twenty minutes into the film, and it has been nothing but mask drama peppered with now-stale jokes and observations made by Trey Parker and Matt Stone on any one of their South Park Covid specials; a broad, oversimplification of the tone which will shade the rest of the film but proves Aster’s precision as a writer to lampoon extremists of all ideals.  While Aster never loses focus across the runtime as he tries to reckon with the scars left behind from Covid as the wounds were being cut, he is thankfully sharp enough to know that the entire film cannot simply relitigate these topics and begins to build up a narrative in the tense, powder keg environment which he has chosen to set his scene. 

That narrative hinges on the upcoming mayoral election with incumbent Ted Garcia, the populous – or through some lenses, elitist – candidate.  While Aster’s film remains starkly apolitical against the real world as opposed to something like Sean Baker’s Red Rocket (2021), albeit set pre-pandemic but with no shortage of TV screens where Trump/Clinton debate soundbites echoed loudly through dilapidated Texas trailer homes, Eddington never ascribes a political party to its residents because everyone is operating on the same frantic, outer fringe.  One can easily extrapolate which side of the arc the characters most likely fall, but it becomes impossible to ignore the absurdity of the ideals, even when they overlap with that of the audiences, simply because they are teased out to their most extreme version.  Pascal brings a soothing presence to the film in stark contrast to Phoenix’s Joe, but we soon begin to realize that it is all a facade.  Ted has a whole team behind him making sure that he is always polished as the perfect candidate for office, meticulously curating his image so that even while his council meets at his bar despite lockdown, there is always a loophole that allows it.  This obsession with perception overflows into trying to control Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), his teenaged son’s, life in lockdown away from his friends: Brian (Cameron Mann) and Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), the latter of whom is pinned after by the two boys. 

Their feud creates a bit of a foil to the feud simmering between Ted and Joe outside of the ballot box.  We learn that before Louise (Emma Stone) married Joe, she had originally been romantically involved with Ted in a relationship that may or may not have ended entirely amicably.  Joe, of course, sees this as further insult when combined with his rickety poll numbers, and Ted is all too happy to rub his nose in this bit of overlapping history since Joe is unable to lash back out at Ted’s wife – murdered in their home some years prior – without totally torpedoing his campaign in the court of public opinion.  It is just another shortcoming for the struggling sheriff who is unable to talk to his wife about starting a family and lives in a house with a shrine to his deceased father-in-law; also a sheriff, also murdered.  Everything around Joe reminds him of his own personal inadequacies, much in the same way that Brian grows resentful as he watches Eric and Sarah grow closer.  In the same way that Joe quickly throws his name on the ballot to best his social rival, so too does Brian jump headfirst into activism so that he can grow closer to Sarah, only to find that she sees through is inauthenticity and the young man grows even more resentful. In the epilogue of the film, we see that he turns into a young MAGA Republican influencer, sneaking photo ops with the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene for clout online. 

As the film evolves, the at-once large and sprawling plot really begins to laser focus in and Eddington becomes akin to the Passion of Joe Cross, allowing Phoenix again, full reign over the troubled and hapless psyche of a stunted man with allusions of grandeur.  After spending the first half of the film driving around town in his campaign-outfitted patrol car – not dissimilar to the Hal Phillip Walker van in Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975) – the bumbling fool is dealt a final humiliation at executing a noise complaint against Ted Garcia who is blasting Katy Perry’s Firework at a campaign event being hosted at his home for the rich and influential township leaders.  With his tail between his legs, he returns to the town, once again running into Lodge, this time killing the man in a shocking amping up of the violence from Aster across his as-till-yet stated-but-simmering feud.  The Rubicon having been crossed, Joe returns that night to the Garcia estate with a sniper rifle in hand and assassinates Ted and his son in their own home.  The following final hour is a flurry of fallout unfurling at a breakneck pace as the Pueblo Sheriff, Officer Jiminez Butterfly (William Belleau), is not as keen to hand over investigation to the Eddington police department, nor is he going to take their word at face value and Joe enters into the “Find Out” stage of his ordeal. 

This final act is where everything that Aster has been building towards finally comes together in a chaotic intersection pileup, but it also shows some stress fractures in the narrative that is absolutely bursting at the seams.  Eddington is far more than just a Covid story, and even beyond the rise of online conspiracy theories that popped up on all corners of the internet at the time, Aster is also weaving in the very real tensions and protests that came about after the George Floyd murder.  It is one of the more uncomfortable threads which the film explores, simply because using a real tragedy to flavor fiction almost always leaves an unsavory taste behind, but Aster is actually approaching this aspect of his story with a good faith argument and not using it as simple emotional and thematic shorthand for his characters.  Most specifically, this plot is examined through Michael (Michael Ward), a young African American man who is rising in the ranks of Joe Cross’ police department, quickly surpassing his more ho-dunk partner, Guy (Luke Grimes) – and even to a degree, Joe, himself – in all aspects of police work.  As he is called to be a presence at the various mildly attended protests across the town, their organizer – and, coincidentally, his ex-girlfriend – Sarah demands to know how he can continue on with this line of work given everything that has come out surrounding the intersection between police violence and people of color.   

With protests on the rise, so too is attention to little, small-town Eddington, and that is just where ANTIFA have set their sights.  Even for those who were riding out this train of thought with Aster may find, not the mere inclusion of ANTIFA and crisis actors to be a bridge too far, but their slapdash execution opens up more avenues of questioning that it answers.  At their core, they are agents of chaos and that should be enough justification for their wild actions, but in a film that has been so metered even in its broadest swings, and from a director that knows how to precisely portion out his tension from the pipette, this bit of sloppiness if uncharacteristic.  Their inclusion also really cracks open this story to a much wider landscape that it had initially been working within, but so often is the case in really life when tragedy strikes a small town and suddenly they become a household name overnight, in no small part to the 24/7 news cycle that kicks in to overdrive whenever there is unrest or loss to report on.  That angle is not particularly examined by Aster, which is not to say by its absence is his co-signing of this socially parasitic practice, but it seems like a glaring omission in his otherwise lengthy list of tech-age grievances, and not one that would be necessarily hard to weave in and lampoon. 

Eddington is a finely honed edge of a satire that certainty cuts deep, but so often feel like it is more of a handsome display piece than a true, working blade.  Aster is clearly working through a lot, and in some cases, it is too much making the just shy of 2.5 hour runtime seem truncated, especially in how slow the film is to start against how quickly it seeks to wrap everything up at in the third act.  This is a film and a story that absolutely needed more time to be told.  As presented, it is bloated but empty at the same time, and despite some of the darkly comedic jabs which land with punishing accuracy, it still makes for an unsatisfying viewing experience, even beyond just the sheer unpleasantness of relitigating the turbulent year that was 2020. Like a Thanksgiving spread on the Christmas china being served at Easter time, any one of these things is equally delightful and gratuitous, but all together it lacks the cohesion necessary to be a truly profound and singular experience. Surely, however, the themes at play will only get better with age and this snapshot of an era will endure and its appreciation will grow.