Remember that moment where we all kind of just…gave up

In theatres now, Eddington could have only come from the mind of Ari Aster as he takes us back to the beginning of COVID where we all began to lose the ability to be actual human beings.

In May of 2020, a standoff between a small-town sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and mayor (Pedro Pascal) sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in Eddington, New Mexico.

Only Aster could give us an experience with Eddington that is both sickly genius and emotionally way too soon as this film really does encapsulate those moments when we broke down with the realization that this was no six week bug we were living through and that our lives had ultimately changed forever.

Casting a faded and sunbaked pallor over the proceedings, Eddington is such dark social satire that makes us laugh but it also makes us squirm and cover our faces in uncomfortable silence because there are still many of us out there behaving like some of these characters.

It’s an oddly exhilarating examination of human nature that actually makes you feel like you are in a science fiction picture with the town of Eddington as a decent approximation of human beings and how they behave.  Aster uses the dust, the sun and the general confusion of the real world situations around them and makes them more terrifying than anything else Aster’s sick little brain has come up with.

The film is a masterful exercise in production design, costuming and style as well because he captures that worn sensibility in concert with the pair of sweatpants that are still draped over the back of the chair in our apartments because it’s all still just a little too fresh.

Eddington is successfully bi-partisan but not in a way that is trying to lecture or take sides but in a way that lingers and reminds us that we’re all still dealing with this crap in more ways than one.

That comes through brilliantly in the performance from frequent Aster collaborator and fellow eccentric Joaquin Phoenix.  He shows his chops here as a modern day John Wayne trying to do the right thing for his community.  But unlike Wayne (or Jimmy Stewart) or any other prototypical small town sheriff in a western, he’s a neurotic self-involved insecure mess and in May of 2020 that was the general psyche of the entire population of the planet.  If Spencer Tracy as John J Macreedy in Bad Day At Black Rock needed a Xanax prescription, that would be Phoenix here.

Pedro Pascal shines as the overly PC mayor who just isn’t all that nice and the likes of Emma Stone, Austin Butler get some moments in next to Phoenix who once again carries Aster’s version effortlessly.

While people are calling Eddington a modern western (and they aren’t wrong) I’d actually equate this more to something akin to Japanese Folk Lore or a classic morality tale, because while the lines between right and wrong invariably get a little blurry, there’s always some pretty fucked up things happening in the underbelly of this small town.

Eddington is both too soon and right on time as we get to uncomfortably laugh at the stupid shit we all did when basic human dignity fell by the way side and be reminded of the realities that we’re actually still doing most of it  Decency and kindness are the easiest things to let slip through our fingers.