‘Eddington’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal Shoot Blanks ..

‘Eddington’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal Shoot Blanks in Ari Aster’s Neo-Western, Which Confuses Absurdism With Incoherence

Did we all go completely nuts during those unsettlingly strange first months of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when cities became ghost towns and people thrust into isolation started gambling with their mental health by living online and buying whatever the social media echo chamber coughed up? That’s the assessment in Ari Aster’s Eddington, which views that collective national trauma through the microcosm of a fictitious New Mexico small town. Essentially a modern Western marbled with a vein of dark comedy, the movie is neither suspenseful nor funny enough to work as either. Mostly, it’s a distancing slog.

After the diabolically well-crafted classic horror of Hereditary and Midsommar, gifted writer-director Aster took a turn into more personal territory with the uneven Oedipal odyssey Beau Is Afraid, a tumble down a rabbit hole of neuroses full of striking nightmarish imagery and poignant confessional moments of crippled masculinity. Ultimately, though, the movie felt more nourishing for the filmmaker than the audience.

Aster’s fourth feature shares some key qualities with its immediate predecessor. It’s bloated, self-indulgent, rambling, crazily ambitious and commendably odd, but so overstuffed it becomes a lethal combination of baffling and boring.

The director throws a bucketload of ideas at the screen — about American history, racial disharmony, political standoffs, protest movements and disinformation, for starters — but most of them tend to fizzle before making any cogent points beyond “Hey, look at the mess we make of our lives when left to our own devices,” both figuratively and literally.

Eddington takes digs both at sanctimonious liberalism and self-dealing conservatism, but it’s so careful to avoid taking a firm political stance that its barbs seldom land. It also sticks a highly capable cast in user-unfriendly roles that pretty much leave us with no one to care about. It drops us back into that surreal summer five years ago, without the benefit of fresh perspective.

Set over a volatile period in late May of 2020 that could be days or weeks, the film once again stars Joaquin Phoenix, this time as Sevilla County sheriff Joe Cross. He’s introduced being pulled over by Indigenous sheriff Butterfly Jiminez (William Belleau) and his deputy for entering their jurisdiction, the Pueblo of Santa Lupe, without a face mask.

Joe is a wheezy asthmatic who claims he can’t breathe with a mask on. That puts him in league with ornery old-timers being refused entry into supermarkets, where customers queue outside, standing six feet apart.

His anti-mask position also puts Joe at odds with the town’s 100 percent mask- and social distancing-compliant mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who’s up for re-election. He is working with the New Mexico governor to push through permits for a massive artificial intelligence data center. Ted argues that it will bring wealth and employment to the dying town, while many residents just see it as a further drain on their already dwindling resources — particularly water, due to a prolonged drought.

There are several prickly confrontations between Joe and Ted in the film, but nothing that really taxes the two actors or has fun with the genre tropes of an Old West showdown.

For a while though, Aster does succeed in drawing us in with the sheer cacophony of noise on social media — from coding experts tracing insidious patterns back to 1956 through a theory that masks make it easier for child-smugglers, bizarre web headlines like “Is Hillary at Gitmo?” and Joe’s mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) pointing to extensive pandemic drills at Johns Hopkins two years earlier as evidence that the whole thing was planned.

The overbearing Dawn, who has outstayed her welcome in what was supposed to be a temporary lockdown solution, is not Joe’s only headache at home. His uncommunicative wife Louise (Emma Stone), whose hobby is making artsy puppet dolls with disturbing faces, struggles with mental illness stemming from sexual abuse when she was 16 and subsequently being forced to have an abortion. She’s so translucent and fragile she seems at risk of vanishing.

The powder keg situation in the town is stoked primarily by the upsurge in Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis cop. Joe and his deputies Mikey (Michael Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes) get caught up in the middle of it; a video of the sheriff’s altercation with a violent unhoused man (Clifton Collins Jr.) goes viral as evidence of police brutality.

The mayor’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and his buddy Brian (Cameron Mann) fall under the influence of fired-up protest agitator Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle). Brian’s eagerness to embrace the movement yielded the one time I laughed out loud in the movie, when he spouts a mouthful of newly acquired views at the dinner table: “We’re changing institutions, dismantling whiteness and not allowing whiteness to rebuild itself.” This prompts his flabbergasted father to respond, “What? You’re white!”

It’s an obvious joke, but it’s funny, as is Brian in a public forum proclaiming that it’s time for white people to listen, “Which I will be doing as soon as I finish this speech.”

Joe raises the temperature by announcing he’s running against Ted for mayor, promising to reopen businesses and remove restrictive mandates. His half-baked campaign soundbites (“We need to free each other’s hearts”) are matched by misspelled slogans on his car, like “Your being manipulated.”

He makes a blunder by using Louise’s trauma as a weapon to discredit his opponent. That makes Lou a susceptible convert to the cult of Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who claims his personal experience of being sold as a boy into a pedophile sex-trafficking ring gave him the empathy to provide consolation to others in pain.

Like I said, there’s a lot going on in Eddington, even more so when desperation leads to political assassinations and a whole wave of gun violence, while Pueblo sheriff Jiminez starts eyeing Joe as not just a fool but probably a criminal. But none of the tangled threads amounts to much.

Maybe the point is that we didn’t really learn anything about our national dysfunction during lockdown, or whatever we did learn was quickly forgotten, which, as a conclusion to an almost three-hour movie, seems simplistic.

The cast all do what’s required of them, but no performance stands out in any major way, aside from the fact that Phoenix’s mush-mouth delivery and punch-drunk weariness as Joe make him seem like he’s already begun unraveling even before the story gets going. The movie looks fine, but for a DP of the caliber of Darius Khondji working in a physically dramatic setting like New Mexico, it’s undistinguished.

Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton’s ominous score is a good match for the needling quality shared by all four of Aster’s features. But if Hereditary and Midsommar got under the skin with genuinely scary storytelling and startling imagery and Beau is Afraid was equal parts squirmy and maddening, Eddington is just annoying and empty.