SPOILER-FREE PLOT SUMMARY
Set during May of 2020, just a couple months after the world went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Eddington Mayor Ted Garcia (played by Pedro Pascal) locks horns with town Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). Cross’s wife, Louise (Emma Stone), seems to have a brief-but-sordid history with the mayor and Cross decides, on a whim, to run against him in the upcoming election. Gradually, the issues of the world creep their way into Eddington, New Mexico. First, the heated contention of the mask mandate, then the George Floyd murder leading to civil unrest and then the increasing suffocation of the unknown during the pandemic.
SPOILER-FREE REVIEW
In a magnificent piece of writing, Ari Aster (also the director) uses the backdrop of a small town to illustrate the exact political and social turmoil we, as an entire country, find ourselves dealing with right now. But he does it without mentioning the name of any political party, without choosing any side and without using any lazy archetypes.
If you’re conservative, you’ll come away saying “See? Liberals may mean well but they’re only making things worse in demonstrating the way they do and pretending to know how to solve everything.” And, if you’re liberal, you’ll come away saying “See? Conservatives surround themselves with ridiculous spiritual-based toxicity by way of brainwashing content and they immerse themselves in cult ideologies disguised as self-help information. Can’t they see that’s all garbage?”
The message isn’t limited to politics, however. EDDINGTON does a phenomenal job in showing the audience the rift between multiple generations as well. Even at the dinner table, the younger generation thinks they’re fighting injustice by being proud to explain their ideology while the older generation has no idea what they’re talking about. And, in the streets, the older generation stands around waiting for the authorities to handle things while the younger generation uses that lack of action to gain momentum for their cause.
In the real world, if we want to believe something (whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, whether UFO’s exist or whether Tupac is still alive somewhere), we, as humans, will search out media that reinforces that belief so we can feel validated. It’s called confirmation bias and EDDINGTON shows us how easily we’re manipulated by what we consume, regardless of what we believe in.
As far as the performances go, EDDINGTON is pretty much a murderers row of top notch talent. Phoenix is the lead and he’s great, Stone plays the troubled, impressionable young woman perfectly, Austin Butler is 10-out-of-10 creepy as a charismatic cult leader, Michael Ward reaches through the screen to make you feel his betrayal and, before her first scene is over, you want to punch Deirdre O’Connell in the face.
Make no mistake, EDDINGTON is not entertaining in the traditional sense. I enjoyed the majority of it, I saw a lot of rarely-captured symbolism and each performer crushed what they were given. But none of that means I left the theater entertained. I’d go so far as to say real movie lovers will appreciate it but there’s zero reason an everyday audience member would ever “want” to sit down and devote 2.5 hours of their life to it.
It’s just too bad the final 30 minutes feels like a completely different film than the first two hours. It’s almost as if Aster didn’t know how to resolve the powder keg situation he wrote about so he went a completely different direction. Despite its lack of entertainment value, this movie would’ve been considered among the year’s best were it not for the completely disjointed finale.
In the first 120 minutes anyway, the film shows us — if we’re listening — that we’re all human with real struggles, real sacrifices and real mistakes. It’s a shame that the people who need to see EDDINGTON won’t. Aster refuses to use the screen to belittle anybody but, then again, I guess he doesn’t have to since everybody does enough of that in the real world already.
JKG SCORE: 7.5
Untitled Film Project 