Pedro Pascal and Joaquin Phoenix Are Set to Do Battle in a Paranoid America in Ari Aster’s “Eddington”
The setting is Eddington, New Mexico. The month and year are May 2020. It was, as you surely recall, a deeply bizarre, horrifically upsetting time as the world as we knew it was in the process of a forced reckoning with mortality, morality, America’s long history of racism, and what at times felt like, at least here in the United States, a nationwide crackup. So it’s the perfect set-up for a filmmaker like Ari Aster, who already has three deeply unsettling and very singular films to his name— his hardcore horror freakout Hereditary (2018), his sun-baked Scandinavian nightmare Midsommar (2019), and his trippy, trauma-drama Beau is Afraid (2023). Now, Aster has set his sights on our early pandemic-era civic strife, where regular citizens struggled against each other and themselves in a suddenly shrunken world of social distancing, masking, shutdowns, and the politicians and internet trolls who turned these realities and necessities into incendiary devices meant to burn down any sense of shared sacrifice or common decency two or more citizens of the same country might feel for each other.
Aster is one of our most fearless filmmakers, content to make viewers squirm in his pursuit of creating wholly original films. Once again, he’s tapped Joaquin Phoenix after working with him in Beau is Afraid to play Joe Cross, the Eddington city sheriff, the one guy in town who refuses to wear a mask, even though he’s also an asthmatic. Joe is one of the folks who simply don’t believe in all the stats about COVID transmission, nor does he think lockdowns make any sense at all.
Joe’s antagonist is Pedro Pascal’s mayor, Ted Garcia, who he challenges in the next election. Their enmity for each other isn’t just about their divergent politics (Ted believes in science and wearing masks and the like), but a deep, personal wound that Joe still nurses from their past.
Early in the film, the George Floyd murder occurs, and the repercussions of Floyd’s murder are felt in Eddington, as a small movement of anti-racist youth starts making trouble in town. Aster is trying to pinpoint the moment America began to crack apart, when anger and resentment, be it over COVID protocols, America’s historic racism, encroaching tech-supremacy, and the conspiracy theories that crept across the country captured larger and larger swaths of the country, to the point where some of the most powerful people in America were parroting insane talking points and neighbors distruted neighbors. Dread, anger, and paranoia are all rich themes for a filmmaker like Aster to explore, made all the more terrifying by coming from a history so recent that we’re still living through it.
The trailer gives you just a taste of this deep slice of how Aster sees what happened to America, perhaps what’s still happening to America, in the wake of a pandemic that upended the entire world and a call for social justice, which has as many proponents as it does detractors. With incredible performers and a filmmaker unafraid to hold a mirror, cracked as it might be, up to the United States, Eddington might not be the feel-good movie of the summer, but it’s still absolutely a must-see.
Check out the trailer here. Eddington arrives in theaters on July 18.
Featured image: L-r: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington.” Courtesy A24
