It is too common today to see ambitious filmmakers transform their films into “declarations” which adapt too well to predefined ideological boxes. But in “Eddington”, his cosmic Cosmic Sociological To-Audacious, Crucial, Ari Aster (“Beautiful is frightened”, “Midscommade”) joyfully throws away any index of liberal art orthodox.
The film takes place in the city of the Eddington desert, in New Mexico, during the summer covid of 2020, and the first indication that it will offer a major adjustment of conventional wisdom is that the protagonist, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), which is the city’s sheriff, is almost the only person in the city who refuses to wear a facial mask. It is an asthmatic, but it also has a cheeky contempt for statistics cowled on the transmission and for the general concept of locking. Does her position speak for the film? It is more difficult to pin, because Joe, on the one hand, is the character with whom we wondered, but Phoenix plays him like a shambolic, serious and benign vision but fundamentally a walking mess.
Not long in the film, the murder of George Floyd occurs, and the demonstrations that take place in Minneapolis and in other American cities trigger a small local movement in Eddington of anti -racist youth. The film is unambiguous to represent them as a bunch of deceived narcissics whose conception of themselves illustrates the very privilege that they have overturned. ASTER does not just laugh at making them mocking them; Its real point is that the moralist self-justice has become a kind of dependence in America. Nevertheless, that he launches his film in beer of the protocols, only to press the radical-chic fervor of the white children of the middle class, can make you ask you, for a moment, if Ari Aster has turned into a right of hipster on the right which launches cherry bombs attached to the discussion points of Fox News.
In fact, it’s not that simple. In “Eddington”, Aster is seriously serious to dramatize what he considers the glass to research that America has crossed during the Pandemic era. He targets this moment like the great crack-up, the moment when the country has lost its collective spirit. But in the film, there are many components, taken from a wide cultural-ideological spectrum. The film shows sympathy for the increasingly common vision than the meaning of control This dominated the codvised years has gone too far. That Eddington, although larger than a small town – is a place of streets and tentacular buildings – seems to be anything but abandoned is something that launches its own strange fate; He represents a dug, exhausted, deprived of his hope for the future. When a teenager is chewed by his father for having joined a “gathering” (that is to say that he met half a dozen of his friends in the park), we feel the rampant unreality.
But Covid is only the trigger. “Eddington”, although it is not a comedy, highlights an angry, sinister and perhaps crazy new America that it considers with an impassive tone of hectic joy. And the film presents us a vision fully on the scale of this transformed society. As ASTER presents, what happened to the American is a question of covid and all that the implacable rules of the pandemic made us. This is the boom in the new rumbling moral absolutism. This is the way in which conspiracy theory, which was the province of Liberal-Left, has become the new Crackpot paradigm of Central America, to the point of attacking the government for lies and concealations (like, you know, the plathius) has gone from a rebellious position to a kind of authoritarian reflex.
It is also the creeping paranoia of the culture of firearms and paranoia which gathered around the too real problem of pedophilia (a trend that in fact started with the tests of daycare and the milk boxes and the pizzagate of the missing children). This is the way social media has become a dark room of mirrors that enlarge these toxic forces, to the point that the deformation of reality almost seemed to be the buried reason for all this. And this is the disturbing boom of Big Tech (embodied here by a huge data center proposed from a company called SolidgoldGikarp), which is both the orchestrator and the beneficiary of this Hall of Mirrows.
It looks a lot like a chewing film, but “Eddington”, for all its intoxicating themes, is a much more agile and relatable entertainment than the latest Aster film, the Masochistic surrealist “Surrealist” beautiful is frightened. ” The new film lasts two and a half hours, and it finally takes a turn in something in a disturbing way over there. But for the most part, Aster attracts us by telling an anchored and strangely striking story, that the themes of the age of the pandemics circulate in a way.
It all starts with the desperate incompetent sheriff, now, incompetent of Phoenix, being under fire for his anti-masque position, then making the decision to challenge the city mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), with his chic donors and his easy smile. Joe decides to run for the mayor himself, but these two men have an enmity that dates back to a buried personal scandal: twenty years earlier, Garcia slept with Louise (Emma Stone) at the age of 16 and pregnant him. She had an abortion and continued to marry Joe. Joe and she are still together, living in a house of Isolated Ranch at the top of a little Mesa (with the windy mother of Louise, played by Deirdre O’Connell; she moved during Covid). But Louise has history of mental illness, and Emma Stone plays her as the image of a fragile and washed vulnerability.
The marriage is suspended by a thread, and the thread is cut when Austin Butler, acting with the sweetness of young Johnny Depp, appears as Vernon, who is part of what seems to be a cult devoted to victims of sexual abuse on children. Vernon is seated in the Cross cuisine and tells his story, a piece of recovered memory that replaced his other memories, and it is so brutally far away that we think: is it to save people or implant them with new identities? More specifically: is that what “salvation” becomes in America? Louise, in Thrall with Vernon’s therapeutic snake oil, soon abandoned Joe, which leaves him devastated.
Aster is seizing how the dislocation of reality which becomes the medal of the kingdom is not only a political / media phenomenon; His tentacles reach the heart of intimate relations. And we see the same kind of social panic that has become emotional when the Black Lives Matter movement hits Eddington. The film never doubts the validity of the demonstrations which clashed against the murder of George Floyd. But he satiates the performative aspects of a certain brand of radicalism in the middle class, and the way in which this envelops various members of the community, like Sarah (Amèlie Hoeferle), which becomes a real self-labish believer that she begins to resemble a member of the weather; Brian (Cameron Mann), a local child who begins to want to flirt with Sarah, can then his identity undergoing a prolonged mutation (with a real gain in the end); And Michael (Micheal Ward), the black cop who works for Joe and could not be more a right arrow, but ends up with the victim of a group of terrorist extremists who are there to “save” him.
There is no doubt that in “Eddington” Art Aster is a burning provocateur, in the same way that Todd Field made in “Tár” when he staged the confrontation to Juilliard between Cate Blanchett and the Bipoc student who questioned her devotion to dead-white composers. However, as much as the specific point of view of “Eddington” is intended to be the subject of many incendiary debates, I would say that this is not quite a case of ASTER becoming a version approved by David Mamet. What he captures in “Eddington” is an entire society – left, right and environment – which is transformed, because it stands out from any feeling of collective values.
The film talks about the center that does not hold, and you feel that refracted through each stuttering of pleading of the alienated and sad performance of Phoenix. It is not quite up there with its big ones, but it is not one of its Mumbembly showboat either. There is a bitter Émorate for Joe, who is underway above his head with musical hair. When he finally takes things in hand, you continue to root for himself even if he does something indefensible. For a certain time, the film becomes a dark thriller, the one who plays Joe’s investigation team on the efforts of a local Pueblo officer, Butterly Jimenez (William Belleau), which we suspect could transform into version of our hero of Inspector Javert.
But just when you think you have “Eddington” pinned as a coherent and even conventional suspense tale, the film launches from sub -you and enters a foreign field. He does not get lost in the dark funhouse of his own vanitors, as “beautiful is afraid”. But it grows a little… abstract. There is an indulgent side to Ari Aster, and although it is more under control here, you can feel it. However, he is also inseparable from what makes him, in “Eddington”, such a stimulating filmmaker. He wants to show us the really wide situation, and although “Eddington” is not a horror film, he puts his finger on a kind of madness that you will recognize with a tremor.
