Rob Reviews "Eddington"

In Ari Aster’s Eddington, a small town in New Mexico is turned upside down when local county sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) goes head-to-head with Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) at the height of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic in a film that is described as a “western comedy”.

I REALLY should go back to watching trailers for films before I see them, but I don’t even know if that would have helped here.  But, again… I should have known given Aster’s resume and A24.

This DOES have an all-star cast that includes Deidre O’Connell, Emma Stone, Luke Grimes, Austin Butler, and even Clifton Collins, Jr that walks the line of ensemble piece while still being Phoenix’s vehicle to carry.  Joe Cross is defiant in the face of mandates that are local, county, state, AND federal while truly believing that he is serving the best interests of his community, while Pascal really does some amazing work as his foil whose ties to Cross runs deeper and wider than what is seen on the surface.

I don’t really want to go deeper into the script itself because 1 – there is A LOT going on here, so 2 – I don’t want to spoil anything.  The trailer that I saw right before writing this review kind of does, but really only if you do some SERIOUS digging.  Even the one-sheet gives away a couple of things in the same vein, but again, you really need to do the homework there.

This was actually the first film that Aster (who also wrote the script) wanted to direct but chose to work with Hereditary and Midsommar first and was actually not taking place during May of 2020.  His choice to add that element to this story ramps up the intensity that much more in a way that can remind the audience of the emotions and even the head-shaking moments we as a nation went through during that time.  As the tagline states, “Hindsight is 2020,” and that couldn’t be more true as this story unfolded in front of me for a VERY long two and a half hours.

The only “western” piece of this really comes in the final thirty minutes, but there are moments sprinkled throughout that could be seen as a modern version of the genre, but even then it can be a loose interpretation.  As far as the “comedy” aspect goes, in my screening it felt more like uncomfortable laughter than any slapping of knees.  If anything, Eddington is an indictment of America as a whole during a time of pure turmoil and how it bled into every aspect of our beings: physical, emotional, and psychological in a way that felt heavily influenced by The Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino in its presentation.  This is not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is not one that I feel I would want to revisit outside of it being background noise that I could check in on every once in a while.