Eddington
Theatrical release poster

Aster’s impressive debut, Hereditary (2018), helped launch the term “elevated horror,” as a domestic tale of family grief segued into supernatural horror.

Midsommar (2019) helped Florence Pugh’s ascent to stardom and made viewers worried about attending Swedish (and other) folk festivals.

Beau Is Afraid (2023), sort of an update on The Odyssey, proved more difficult for audiences to parse, albeit with the same star, Joaquin Phoenix.

Each of the above three films followed emotionally beleaguered (anti)heroes subjected to absurd trials amidst bursts of shocking violence.

With Eddington, his lengthy, sprawling saga, Aster has upped the ante in scale, ambition, and budget–it his first film to premiere at the Cannes Film Fest, in competition for the prestigious Palme d’Or prize.

A contemporary western, Eddington turns Aster’s usual preoccupations inside out.  Instead of focusing on the psychological travails of a single protagonist, the scope is widened to a cross-section of racially diverse inhabitants in a fictional small town, sort of a microcosm of the state of America.

Meanwhile, Joe is losing his wife Louise (Emma Stone) to the presence of cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). Louise is suffering from a mysterious trauma, doesn’t like to be touched and refers to herself in the third person when stressed. In her spare time, she makes creepy dolls that Joe pays his colleague to buy.

Rounding out his household is mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who relishes berating everyone – her voice is heard off camera while Joe suffers in the foreground.

Digital culture is masterfully seeded as a radicalising force in a kaleidoscope of different directions.

The screenplay is as fluent in the language of identity politics as it is slogan-driven electioneering.

Eddington aims to skewer a range of political issues, or rather postures. For instance, a young white man hosting a vigil for a murdered Hispanic man notes, “My job now is to listen, which I’ll do right after I’ve made this speech, which I have no right to make!!!”

Micheal Ward stands out as the police officer justifying Joe’s comment that “a third of my department is Black!” (It’s a department of three.) His stoic demeanor is a study in micro-acting and when, after one injustice too many, it slips, it suddenly seems like Eddington is his film.

This sweeping effort shows that the Wild West still exists on the ground and online, with Aster showing a keen eye for people living in an isolated landscape.

End Note:

Greeted with mixed-to-negative reviews, Eddington was a box office disappointment, failing even to recoup its budget of $25 million.

Cast
Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Cross, Eddington’s sheriff and mayoral candidate
Pedro Pascal as Ted Garcia, Eddington’s mayor, running for re-election
Emma Stone as Louise Cross, Joe’s wife
Austin Butler as Vernon Jefferson Peak, radical cult leader
Luke Grimes as Guy Tooley, officer at the sheriff’s office
Deirdre O’Connell as Dawn, Louise’s mother
Micheal Ward as Michael Cooke, officer at the sheriff’s office
Amélie Hoeferle as Sarah Allen, social justice influencer
Clifton Collins Jr. as Lodge, mentally-ill vagrant

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