If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog for the last 7-8 years then you know the constant negative criticism I have of cinema in general is that most movies appear to be made out of surface level twitter activist talking points for Twitter activists to debate about on Twitter. It’s all so formulaic and anti-art. Genuine art and coherent stories takes second and/or third place on the checklist of forced representation, pandering, catering to every possible personal problem, etc.
Eddington is
absolutely one of those movies. But it kind of work this time! It plays out like a director poking fun at someone’s overly sensitive chronically online fever dream. Kind of working is saying something considering most movies these days do not work for one reason or another (pandering to the audience, not looking/feeling like an actual movie, really stupid plot twists, etc). I don’t think a movie like
Eddington can totally please everyone or totally hit every mark but I respect Ari Aster for taking the big swing and getting a good piece of the ball.
Yes this is a Covid movie set during the height of the first wave of lockdown. Yes it touches on issues like empty disingenuous BLM activism perpetuated by young white people and the fake outrage/care that conservatives have when it comes to wearing a mask or protecting abused children. But it works. It works because Ari Aster doesn’t actually take a side. Some have called
Eddington's approach "centrist" but I don't see it that way. He shows just about everyone as a fake bullshit artist.
Who and what is being poked fun at or referenced in
Eddington is obvious…
While
Eddington is somewhat different from the rest of Aster’s films, his regular cinematic influences and references are still there…
 |
| Psycho / Eddington |
 |
Lost Highway / Eddington
|
 |
Robocop / Eddington
|
At its core -
Eddington is about the disingenuous political motivations between two people that just don’t like each other. On one side you have the pretentious Democratic mayor that thinks he’s above everyone. On the other side you have the local sheriff who decides to run against the current mayor because he’s sick of all the Covid mask mandates. As the film unfolds we discover the real motivation behind each side’s campaign. Besides the classic “right versus left” rivalry, Aster injects subplots concerning Qanon, cultism and BLM activism headed up by all white people.
There’s literally a scene in the movie where a white liberal activists tells a Black police officer how to feel about anti-Black racism. If that doesn’t sum up a huge part of the current social political climate I don’t know what does (it should be noted that there is a certain type of liberal/left-leaning Black person that is to blame for allowing liberal white people to speak out of pocket to Black people about the Black experience).
This scene really stood out to me because I grew up in a town where white liberals/left-leaning folks could sometimes get a little too comfortable speaking deeply on cultural issues that don’t concern them. I don’t really care for police (Black police at that) but I’ll be the first person to side with that Black cop if it’s between them and a clueless white liberal that thinks they can brow beat another Black person about Black issues.
The only reason I even bothered to finally watch this is because it’s being compared to
One Battle After Another in an abstract kind of way. Folks are comparing the two movies under the umbrella of “definitive movies representing the current state of America”. I figured
Eddington has to be better than OBAA (
click here to read my rant on One Battle After Another). I understand the comparison between the two movies in a coincidental kind of way. Both are set in the American west which, when shown a certain way, can be a very old timey American setting that calls upon a certain type of nostalgia only Americans can relate to. Neither movie is a traditional western but they do take from the genre on a surface level (snakeskin boots, Cowboy hats and shootouts in the desert). Both movies also have tense explosive finales.
In my opinion,
Eddington is a far better film than OBAA because Ari Aster pokes fun at some of the people that Paul Thomas Anderson desperately tries to pander to in
his film.
It also took me a while to watch this because I’m not in to Ari Aster’s movies. I have a weird personal vendetta against the large majority of Ari Aster’s filmography (please note that I said personal). I came from a good family, grew up around good families and I’ve produced a new generation of a good family. I like healthy upbringings. So I’m not really a fan of the “families mess us up, don’t they??!” I especially don’t like the type of overly heightened/romanticized films in that genre that Aster has given us so far. I’m not denying that family absolutely can and sometime does cause mental illness, trauma, harm and all the other standard online therapy keywords people use. It’s just not interesting to me. Especially when it gets co-opted by people with no personality outside of “my parents messed me up” when in reality they had a pretty solid upbringing (these people exist).
So it makes sense that I like this! It’s so much different than Hereditary or Beau Is Afraid or aspects of certain aspects of Midsommar.
Eddington is far from perfect but I really liked it. Unfortunately, and this isn’t really the film’s fault, Ari Aster gives the audience a little too much credit and assumes they’re smarter than they really are. I think folks without nuance or an understanding of middle ground or grey area could watch this movie and walk away with the wrong idea about most of the characters in the movie with the exception of Austin Butler’s “Vernon” who is clearly a scumbag predator the minute he shows up on screen.
In summation - this is the movie that everyone thinks One Battle After Another is.
