COVID-19, tin foil hat-wearing conspirators, racial tensions, firearm possession, fake news, and overwhelming anxiety, 2020 had it all.
And acclaimed filmmaker Ari Aster, the man who brought us Hereditary and Midsommar, has now put the upheaval of this fraught, powder keg moment in time under the lens in his latest thought-provoking work, Eddington.
Billed as an ‘American neo-Western black comedy thriller’, the film is hinged around a standoff between small-town sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and progressive mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) as a ticking societal time bomb is ready to go off in the small desert town of Eddington, New Mexico.
The featureless town’s empathetic sheriff is married to troubled artist Louise (Emma Stone), and despite his devotion to her, Joe has never let go of the fact that she once dated Ted. His anger and jealously then spirals out of all control when he announces his candidacy for mayor just as the sky seems to be falling in around them.
What follows is a polarising tale brimming over with chaos, violence, melancholy, self-destruction, dark humour and weirdness aplenty. Aster’s latest film reminds me in places of Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. There’s some lovely comedic moments and volatile emotional drama to warrant the comparison, but Aster takes his whole ‘what’s wrong with America’ approach to the absolute extreme.
Eddington is quite captivating in places, especially when it focuses on our human frailties, instead of the madness of social media-suckled modern society.
Just like Aster’s last film, Beau is Afraid, his latest work, as engrossing as it is, will probably go over a lot of people’s heads, and won’t get the kudos it deserves for artistic boldness and enthusiasm. Eddington is way too long, disjointed and about as much fun as a dose of Covid-19 for a good hour of its 180-minute running time.
This is a wild ride indeed but a dose with it!
(3/5)
