Eddington (2025)
Of what use is talking about the past? That’s the central question that rang through after two separate screenings of Ari Aster’s latest, Eddington (2025). A period film, but about a period everyone save for the very young and the very dementia-ridden should be able to recall with ease, the Summer of 2020. The Summer of George Floyd Protests, and the Summer of Covid. It’s not a hot take to suggest this was a fairly consequential few months in explaining the current state of things, at least a bit, so the interest Aster had in wanting to return was understandable. The problem remains, how do you try to tackle about four months in American politics without it turning into either a.) The Newsroom or b.) something totally incoherent. Aster is no lib, so it’s thankfully saved from being too weepy and po-faced, but his millennial South Park hangover and desire to try to say everything he can (even though plenty of it is agreeable!) unfortunately means he can’t keep Eddington from careening into that latter category. “Remember when?” has often been said to be the lowest form of communication, yet this movie is more or less just Aster excitedly showing his Twitter feed from five years ago.
Channeling the chaotic ensemble energy of films by Altman and Linklater, Ari introduces various interweaving characters and follows them around: Joe Cross, our sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and his family and staff, Mayor Garcia (Pedro Pascal), and by far the weakest characters, the Black Lives Matter teenagers, one of whom is Garcia’s son. There is a certain hangup in this approach to screenwriting, as it’s very, very easy for both the writer and the audience to lose interest in the A, B, and C protagonists, and this seemed to happen to Aster himself, somewhere by about the second act mark. Eventually, the movie loses all pretensions that there was only ever one real character in it, a good character, but one who might as well live in the equivalent of a cartoon. There is only one real man in Eddington, and his name: Joe Cross.
A perfect cross (sorry) between Nietzsche’s Last Man and the mythical Last Normal Conservative, a mildly reactionary law and order type who is pathetic and dangerous in equal measure. He wants things, he knows not why, and angrily reacts if his comfort is impeded at all. At home, he has an obviously traumatized wife (Emma Stone in a kind of thankless role) and a real Lady Macbeth-style mother-in-law, and like every other character here, they exist only to bolster him. A major plot line involving Stone’s character leaving him for a QAnon yoga influencer sort (another wasted role, but one Austin Butler handles with panache) only serve to highlight Joe’s own weakness. This might all sound like a maddening railing against the concept of foils and supporting characters. Still, there would be no complaint at all if the entire film stuck to making no pretensions about being anything other than a character study about our sheriff Cross.
Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is perhaps the single character most affected by the fact that Eddington, the film, simply doesn’t know what it wants, and I suppose the same could be said for the town as well. Ostensibly the antagonist of the movie, he is the archetype of the crunchy, tech-money-hungry liberal, down to playing Katy Perry’s Firework at his events. There’s a sinister suit-and-tie offering him cash and blandishments for his support of the construction of a data center, out in the desert, but one that requires public infrastructure and crucially public water. Cross isn’t smart enough to make this connection, so he just blames Bill Gates, which is funny, I guess? Decades of history between the men are mentioned, years of bad blood, and this bleeds into their campaigns, with Cross making a desperate ploy by stating he raped Joe’s wife. All of this is interesting, and one need not be a paleontologist to see the bones of a very good film here in the first half (and again in the last 15 minutes), but Aster’s got his plot on a rail here. The “real” film was always about Joe fighting the forces of modernity and finance capital, represented amusingly by literal antifa super soldiers, so the kind of affable single-father Ted (as opposed to the married and childless Cross), must be killed unceremoniously. The question is why? Why bother with any of this if The Joe Cross Experience was always meant to be the true film?
The last and most regrettable little set here was the Black Lives Matter kids, represented as 90% white and idealistic goobers. Starting with doing a TikTok about reading James Baldwin, this, more so than even the countless misspelled posters Joe makes, really does just kind of feel like cynical sneering for no real reason. It’s also just blatantly ahistorical. If Eddington really wanted to show its audience an accurate portrayal of mainstream politics in 2020, Garcia and hell, maybe even Joe would be wearing kente cloths and taking a knee. And when it comes to Brian, the leftist protestor-turned conservative influencer, I am not terribly sure that Rittenhouse or those like him wanted to be woke and immediately decided to become reactionaries because they didn’t get their romantic fantasies idealized. Brian’s arc resembles a “topical” SVU killer of the week more than an actual Gen-Z chud. More than anything, Aster just seems out of his depth in trying to chart the politics of those a generation younger, and that’s fine, but we really, really did not need even more superfluous characters who represent ideas Aster barely gets himself.
And in the end, where did all of this lead us? A film that is less than the sum of its parts. Eddington occasionally has something to say, and God knows there was some stunning cinematography, courtesy of Darius Khondji (the shot of Cross standing inside of a giant Garcia mural and the data center lighting up the desert are beyond memorable), but it is too internally conflicted to speak with one voice. Maybe in this way, it truly IS a return to 2020, but why the hell would we go back there?
