Eddington

 

It’s 2020, and not much is going right for Eddington, New Mexico sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix). He vehemently objects to the mask mandate implemented by the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Black Lives Matter protests, which include Ted’s son Eric, threaten his authority. At home, his disturbed wife Louise (Emma Stone) is distant, and her conspiracy theorist mother Dawn (Deidre O’Connell), has invited cult leader Vernon (Austin Butler) to dinner. These frustrations prompt Joe to challenge Ted and run for mayor, but far from solving his and the town’s problems, his campaign only makes a volatile situation worse.

Best known for horror fare, writer-director Ari Aster took a stab at cross-genre filmmaking with this Western-satire-thriller mashup. It’s ambitious, and it boasts a strong cast, but in spite of that, it never really delivers the impact that it could have.

No longer fresh but not yet “history,” the recent past has a way of seeming dated before it logically should. With its peak pandemic setting, Eddington falls prey to that. It captures the divisiveness of the time, but it does so in a way that feels superficial, as if it’s going through the motions of what an indictment of pandemic-era political posturing should be. This is in large part due to how underwritten the characters are: from the grandstanding publicity hound sheriff to the hypocritical liberal mayor to the clueless college-aged protestors, they hew fairly closely to type. While we wouldn’t expect satirical characters to be case studies in complexity, we would be forgiven for not wanting them to be so dull. Pascal, Stone, and Butler all feel wasted here.

Phoenix, at least, wrings a good performance out of Sheriff Joe, who alternates between being pitiable and contemptible before finally going off the deep end. The film shifts into conspiracy thriller territory in its final third, and while the tonal shift is a bit jarring, it does give us the hilarious sight of Phoenix panic-firing round after round from a machine gun while screaming into the desert. There are other laughs and thrills to be found here though not enough for the two-and-a-half hour runtime.

Eddington’s concept – a small-town election as a proxy for exploring political polarization across the country – is a winning proposition, and in Sheriff Joe’s breakdown, Aster continues to show his mastery of slow-burn psychological drama. Unfortunately, attempting to merge these themes with several others causes the film to collapse under its own weight.