Review: EDDINGTON

Eddington, New Mexico, May 2020. The small western town is in lockdown. The mayor promotes social distancing but doesn't always practice it. The sherrif doesn't believe the virus has made it to the hamlet even though the town drunk is clearly afflicted and roams the streets and bars spreading it to the air around him. Meanwhile, the youth are rising, turning their sort-of distanced keggers into political meetings as the community responds variously to the news, Black Lives Matter and Antifa and calls for defunding the police hit the air. Little Eddington is behaving like big America with protests made of a babel of differing directions and a comgin showdown between the mayor and the sherriff. Don't worry about missing anything, though, everyone's phone is out and it will all be online in varying degrees of truth. 

Ari Aster, one of the wunderkinds of the 2010s, consolidating his early win Hereditary with the epic scaled Midsommar and then confounded most of his fans with the massive fable Beau is Afraid. Now he's back and has his sights on the greater American epic in the manner of Robert Altman's Nashville, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights or the Coens' No Country for Old Men. The difference, here, is not with approach, they're all of a piece when you look at them, but in how the film suggests not that this is America now but how it happened. The information age that was freeing everyone constrained to remote cultures (or just remote basements) was devoured by capitalism and where once numbers ruled influence usurped democracy. So, instead of an America seen through porn or country music or greed, we see how the invading pandemic appears and then is exploited to transform a flawed but functioning elder democracy into an atomised mess.

While it is clear to see parallels between the characters and the COVID years' public figures, Aster doesn't labour it by being too declaritive. Neither Sherriff Joe nor Mayor Ted evoke a Trump. The conspiracy star Vernon doesn't have to correspond to any particular figure, being so all purpose. Are the terrorist-like groups Antifa, a false flag Klan, or something evern weirder? No idea but they do fire real rounds. But when we see the resulting order, the society that emerges from the rubble of the medical, cultural and political tornado, we know that we are watching types that now walk our earth in positions of authority, having once been lax lawmen, blithering conspiracists or centrist town elders.

Joaquin Phoenix offers a finely tuned and nuanced Joe who's ok at keeping the peace but doesn't handle the confusion of his times well. When one of the rioters assuages a loud protest by manipulating it into silence, Joe walks off, seeing the result is good enough. It's a performance that warns us that he will break, that his voice at the higher end of his register will gun it into a big guitar through a Marshall stack distortion. At the more Zen end of the spectrum, the I'm-in-everything Pablo Pascal as Mayor Ted Garcia, shepherds his consituents into living the right way until he needs to have a fundraiser BBQ and all the regulations loosen. The meeting of these two forces at that occasion is the point where the chaos takes full spark.

Emma Stone has few lines but her torn character takes heart-rending life when she is embraced by Austin Butler's Vernon, a soft spoken rabble rouser. Young Cameron Mann makes one of the biggest transitions from well meaning teenager to the lightlessness of the ultra right.Aster's talent lies in the smoothness of all of this. The film does feel long but also crafted. It's the craft that keeps us there; from the rich digital cinematography and dolby atmos audio mix to the warmth of the performances across the board to the rallying cry to look to as much truth as you can find, it's in the craft

Viewing notes: a small morning session at Kino was blissfully uneventful. Eddington is on gerneral release.