Don’t Fence Me In: Film Review of Eddington
★★★☆
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Films about conspiracy theories seem to be everywhere lately. After reviewing Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, an incisively caustic black comedy about the conflicts between reality, beliefs, and alienation, I watched Ari Aster’sEddington, a neo-Western set during the Covid lockdown in 2020 where citizens, locked away at home and left to their own devices, become ensnared in a myriad of slanderous and ridiculous beliefs.
Set in a tiny rural town nestled on the border between New Mexico and a Pueblo, an Indian reservation, Eddington examines the struggles of a community coming to terms with the political rifts exposed by the Covid pandemic. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is a good old boy who, in defiance of Mayor Ted Garcia’s (Pedro Pascal) decision to impose a lockdown on Eddington per the governor’s mandate, refuses to wear his mask or to enforce the law.
When confronted by Mayor Ted in the local supermarket, Joe maintains that the lockdown is killing the town and that he can’t breathe while wearing a mask. When pressed, he cannot give a logical reason for not enforcing the law. Because of a past incident between Ted and Joe’s emotionally unbalanced wife Louise (Emma Stone), Joe is not about to agree with the man about anything, and in fact, decides to run against him in the upcoming mayoral election.
Joe mounts a campaign that is as pitiful as it is ridiculous. Enlisting his deputies to help him run the campaign (at the expense of law enforcement), he denounces the mayor’s policy of mandatory masking as a violation of freedom of choice and claims that the data center that Mayor Ted supports is some sort of diabolical technological government conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Louise, at the urging of her theory enthusiast mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) goes to see cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) and invite him home for dinner. Peak espouses his conspiratorial beliefs about pedophilia and human trafficking, sucking Louise into his warped world.
In the meantime, in the wake of the George Floyd killing, Ted’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) gets involved in the Black Lives Matter movement with his friend Brian (Cameron Mann) who is sweet on Sarah (Amelie Hoeferle) a social justice zealot. Joe finds himself overwhelmed while trying to stop a demonstration in the town and is barely able to contain himself when confronted by Sarah.
Desperate to jump-start his campaign, Joe stages a streamed campaign event and during it, claims that Ted raped Louise. While addressing a noise complaint during a party at the mayor’s house, Joe is slapped by Ted in public.
Squeezed between extremist elements of the political spectrum and living in a time and place that is not only colored but defined by outlandish conspiracy theories, Joe finds himself in a downward spiral.
His mother-in-law constantly hectors him about getting even with Ted for what he did to Louise—but no one seems to know what, if anything, he did. Louise won’t say, but Joe is burdened with the guilt of avenging an unknown transgression. When he finally blurts out Ted sexually assaulted Louise, he is reviled as a liar and treated as a pariah. Louise even leaves him. All Joe left with is Dawn, his mother-in-law.
When his attempt to stand up for his anti-masking politics by running for mayor results in his failure and humiliation, Joe retaliates the only way he knows how—with violence. And violence, as they say, begets violence.
Eddington is not only penetrating social satire, it is a study of mass paranoia lurking under the façades of political righteousness and patriotic posturing. It seems as if the entire town—with the possible exceptions of the Pueblo inhabitants—are steeped in unsubstantiated internet rumors taken at face value, which seems to be what the people want. They don’t care about drilling down for the facts. They want drama. They want to believe the worst.
When the cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak talks about his background and his abuse at the hands of his father—based on recovered memories—Louise eats it up, even though Joe and her mother both seem skeptical. If Louise is a victim, she relates. If she’s not, then she wants that sympathy. Running parallel to that Sarah the social activist influencer, whose self-righteous indignation—couched in eternally unfocused anger directed at the police and the white establishment—results in the group’s (specifically Brian’s) internalization of blame and his subsequent identity confusion. He can’t figure out whether he is a perpetrator or a victim of white elitism.
Ari Aster’s previous films Hereditary and Midsommar also deal with the inbred peculiarities of sequestered and insular societies, but in this case Aster’s focus is not on a remote Scandinavian village or a warped family tree. It is a version of America, an iteration surrounded and overwhelmed by floods of misinformation whose only rational response is disbelief and mistrust. The town of Eddington is a supercharged microcosm of this version of America in the time of Covid, a place where paranoid fantasies (not unlike politicians engaging in child trafficking in the basement of a pizza parlor) can become real.
The film itself is as entertaining as it is thought-provoking, but for all that, Eddington seems to lack a cohesive center. The action is uneven and at times seems weirdly lifeless and the climax seems to have, like one of its conspiracy theories, dropped from the skies.
The power of satire is its recognizability. The beginning of Eddington is wonderfully relatable and funny, but as the movie progresses, the effect of the satire fades. It works intellectually but not in the gut. It ceases to be funny.
Eddington is a bit of a cypher but still a very good film. Phoenix is simply brilliant as Joe Cross. His combination of ignorant obstinance and cluelessness would be (and is) funny if it wasn’t so dangerous, but his touching love for Emma Stone’s emotionally derelict Louise is endearing. Stone, as usual, gives a perfectly calibrated performance as a woman lost on a sea of lies.
Eddington is one of those films that will age well with time. It may well be that it is too close to our collective experiences under Covid, a time when time stopped, the world stood behind a window, and social intercourse became an individualized experience—just you and the internet.
I just might have to see Eddington again.