Patrick Mulcahy on Covid film without answers
I arrived late to the Ari Aster party, having not seen Hereditary, Midsommer,or Beau is Afraid. However, any American film that tackles the COVID-19 era piques interest. That said, Eddington, writer-director Aster’s fourth feature set in the summer of 2020, disaggregates the setting from the action. It is yet another film in which one man’s downward mental spiral leads to the expression of rage. We’ve watched Falling Down, welcome to “Stumblin’ In”.
God’s lonely man in this instance is New Mexico town sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), needled at home and work. His wife, Louise (Emma Stone, channelling Sissy Spacek), has become distant, creating mutant stuffed dolls that her husband gets his colleagues to buy. “They’re selling pretty well,” he explains by way of elevating her well-being. Louise’s mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), lives with the couple, intravenously connected to madcap theories on TV and the internet, such as the significance of the number 56 – not quite the number of Communists mentioned in The Manchurian Candidate. Cross is asthmatic and is reluctant to wear a face mask. He resents a storekeeper for refusing to serve a man without a mask, queuing outside a pharmacy. He detests the town mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), even more, not just because he dated Louise when she was sixteen, impregnated her and prompted her to get an abortion, but because he circumvents social distancing rules himself, turning a local bar into an office when he holds a meeting there. Garcia has his own issues: his wife left him, and his teenage son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) flouts the gathering rules, hanging round a semi-popular boy named Brian (Cameron Mann).
When Cross decides to run for mayor, turning the sheriff’s department into a campaign office, the film lurches towards comedy. However, Eddington, named after the titular town, is not a satire. Rather, it’s a snow globe, in which a town is shaken by artificial concerns that float to the bottom. Local youth engage in “Black Lives Matter” protests despite the absence of racially motivated police brutality in the town. There is (off-screen) rioting at which windows are broken; we do not however see “hundreds of thousands of dollars-worth of damage” referred to by one anxious caller. Snow globes keep the spectator at a distance. We see a local girl appeal to police officer Michael (Micheal Ward) to join them; he is baffled by her.
Cross attends to incidents not always effectively, constantly being filmed by young people. He has no sympathy for Garcia when a drunken, angry man stands outside the bar, wanting to enter, while Garcia feels intimidated. Cross can’t get a small crowd to disperse with the limited resources – two other officers – at his disposal. His response to Garcia drives Louise further away from him, as she falls under the sway of the ridiculously-named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who describes himself as an escapee from a paedophile ring, whose members were not brought to justice. “Just because you didn’t see it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” he explains after bringing Louise home late for dinner, and accompanied by two acolytes, a married couple recovering from their own trauma. All the while, Aster doesn’t mock his characters. Rather, he asks the audience to draw their own conclusions.
We experience some residual sympathy for Cross. His ineffectiveness at law enforcement and his desire not to punish people makes us think he is just one more person in the wrong job. He nevertheless relies on his position for his political appeal. When the drunk raving man later breaks into the bar, helping himself to liquor, Cross stands and watches, as if observing his own inchoate feelings from a distance. Then he does something.
Eddington is filled with people and opinions butting up against one another. There is a parallel law enforcement maintained by Native Americans. As Cross conducts a murder investigation, a Native American cop enters the crime scene, the body being discovered on their land.
Not everything in the film is explained. We hear a cacophony (“not a coincidence”), but Aster encourages us to disaggregate words from actions. The biggest issue for the town is not Covid, but the construction of a data centre that would take natural resources (especially water) away from local people. “Those resources aren’t there anyway,” one townsperson remarks, opinion passing as truth. Aster stirs up a number of ingredients, but the resultant goo has little taste. Nothing lands. We watch Cross under fire with little investment in his fate. We don’t laugh. Eddington does not answer the question, “what did COVID-19 teach us?” Rather, it tells us that we have yet to understand what there is to learn.
Eddington is on release