Midsommar is among my favourite movies ever, Hereditary is a horror masterpiece, and Beau is Afraid is a wildly strange but fascinating odyssey. Suffice to say, Ari Aster has cemented himself as one of my favourite filmmakers working today and one that I am always eager to see the latest from. With Eddington, Aster teams up again with Joaquin Phoenix to tell a Covid-19 set socio-political satire set in a small New Mexico town where tensions rise between the mayor and sheriff. Despite the divisive reception to the film I went in expecting to love it, and sadly I was quite a bit let down.
The film follows Joe Cross (Phoenix), the sheriff of the small New Mexico town at the heart of the film. After a few tense run ins with the town's mayor Ted (Pedro Pascal) prompted by differences in belief like the importance of wearing masks, Joe decides he will run for mayor against Ted. While pandemic related tensions rise, so too does anti-police sentiment in the wake of George Floyd, leading many of Eddington's youth to protest against their sheriff. That is only scratching the surface of what Eddington is getting at, as the film is essentially a dart board that Aster throws numerous darts at hoping some will stick.
The first act or so was pretty hit or miss for me. Aster does a good job poking fun at both far sides of the political agenda, making Joe and his conspiracy theorist mother in law pretty obnoxious to listed to, but also giving us young characters acting just as obnoxious in their performative activism. Some of the young people in the film seem to be actively wanting change, but one in particular sees a cute girl at a gathering winds up diving headfirst into activism to impress her. There are countless hilarious moments where each side of the coin is made fun of, but sadly the structure of the first act of the film just feels lost a lot of the time. While poking fun at both sides Aster meanders a lot tonally and the end result is a repetitive turn of events that drag more often than they entertain. There are some plot points that I really just didn't understand the point of at all, and sadly most of what we get from Emma Stone and Austin Butler falls in that camp. Neither were bad in the movie, but I really felt like Butler in particular was forced and didn't make sense with the context of the story.
There is a point around the halfway mark of the film where the satire takes a slight step back to deliver more of a murder mystery and that's where Aster really finds his stride. Narratively the film kind of becomes a mess, but that's when I think it works best. There are still moments where social commentary comes through, but they aren't hitting you over the head as much as they do earlier in the film and in turn allow the message to shine more naturally. As things get wilder the film evokes some of the chaos of Beau is Afraid but in a more subdued manner and the result is hilarious and a ton of fun, all while not losing sight of what Aster is addressing. The filmmaking is fantastic here, with Phoenix's performance becoming more and more unhinged and the sound design and camerawork becoming a perfect cacophony of chaos. Sadly the film's epilogue saps a lot of that energy away again, making the already muddled social commentary even more disjointed. There is a hilarious moment with that kid that started protesting to impress the girl, but other than that I found that Aster dropped the ball when he had the chance to tie things up well.
The filmmaking is pretty consistently great, and while most of the cast is under-utilized aside from Phoenix there is a standout performance from Micheal Ward whose character is put in an interesting position as a black police officer in the midst of the protests. Sadly that is just one of about a dozen ideas being thrown at the wall with this film and the end result doesn't live up to a lot of great parts. Wanted to love this but despite its strengths it'll go down as one of the bigger disappointments of the year for me. 2.5/5
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