Eddington (2025)

Watched 7/20/25 (theater)

With the benefit of hindsight, there is almost always a blueprint or two for pop movies of a particular decade or era. A whole lot of westerns and war movies in the '50s and '60s. The ripped, invincible American action hero of the '80s. The talky, low-budget indie boom of the '90s. Comedy hit some peaks in the 00's. Then a rise in superhero-dom via the late '00s through today has lent itself to this trend of "good guys" at the center of our most popular box office hits. And that's great. I, too, love the hero's journey story, and all of the uplifting excitement it can provide. My favorite movies are Star Wars and Indiana Jones, so that proves it. But there's, by way of this hero-centric popularity, a lost art today--the lost art of the complicated, un-heroic main character. Variety is the spice of life and movies about assholes can still teach us things.

The 1970s in particular defined this genre of assholes, criminals, cowards and crazies being front and center. These films didn't feel the need to sugarcoat their main characters, sometimes showcasing an irredeemable fall from grace, other times having little character development at all--a character would start bad and end bad, maybe even worse. And audiences largely took to this. Some of the biggest commercial and critical hits of that decade featured anti-heroes or villains as their marquee players.

We have been through a lot since the '70s, most notably in recent years, a pandemic. And regardless of how many government-mandated rules you did or did not follow during that pandemic, nobody came out of it thinking very highly of the event. It will almost certainly go down as one of the most notoriously brutal phenomena of the young century. The war on COVID-19 took no prisoners on either side of the political spectrum, and caused countless mini-wars to erupt between family members, neighbors, elected officials, etc. Some might call it a nightmare.

So who better to adapt that nightmare through his own horrific lens than A24's golden boy, Ari Aster? A couple of highly-acclaimed horror movies under his belt, and more recently a comedy of horrors in Beau is Afraid that tipped us off to the possibility that there was more to this guy than profoundly violent terror in supernatural and cult settings. Hereditary and Midsommar were hits among film aficionados and scary movie junkies, alike, but Beau is Afraid shares much of the same genre-bending complications that Aster's new COVID period piece, Eddington, shoots for with a sniper scope and often hits. In fact, it's a whole lot of weird, disparate bullseyes that come together quite confidently, and apart from the obviously unpleasant feeling of watching a 2020-set movie, I found myself smack dab in the middle of Aster's wavelength here.

Eddington, which stars Aster-returnee Joaquin Phoenix with Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and Michael Ward, concerns a Phoenix-acted sheriff in a small New Mexico town enforcing, and taking some issue with the law as he attempts to quell the madness sweeping his territory during the early days of the aforementioned pandemic. Phoenix, an actor I have always found hard to relate to but easy to respect, again slips into a wholly odd and uncomfortable role. He's great at that. This time, he's a doughy, stammering, unpredictable guy--and the collision course he is set on takes full advantage of the clash that comes with those traits and the job title of sheriff. It gets more unwieldy than you could possibly imagine.

Pascal plays the mayor of the town, Stone plays Phoenix's wife, Butler plays a cult leader, and Ward is one of the sheriff's deputies. And everyone's really credibly cast and drawn in the script. But this movie is the Joaquin Phoenix show and it doesn't let you forget that. Phoenix's character contains a multitude of eccentricities and surprises, and that foot never lets off the gas long enough to un-focus. The supporting cast is used well as just that--support. They contribute to Phoenix's sheriff character's many failures with very episodic, darkly funny adventures around the fallout of the 2020 summer.

As I sat there watching Eddington, laughing

among a theater of otherwise silent audience members, I tried to parse if these people knew what they were getting into, and if I was the asshole. I don’t think so, and I don’t think so. I think after Beau is Afraid, I can confirm I align pretty heavily with Ari Aster’s sense of awkward humor. And, more crucially, this COVID movie is making fun of everyone, and while it doesn’t really offer a solution, it paints a picture with such sharp observations, often heightened with satire, that I felt completely justified in my laughter in the most cynical of ways.

There are definitely other essays being written about the comparisons between Eddington and No Country for Old Men. Probably the Coens’ other movies, as well. But boy did I love the way Aster was able to infuse those influences. The uncomfortable chuckles bled from almost cartoonish buffoonery are straight out of Raising Arizona, and the domestic drama and untraditional structures are ripped right out of Blood Simple and The Man Who Wasn’t There, which of course are themselves throwbacks to main characters that are hard to root for. No one wants to do that anymore.

Every character in this movie is either evil or a dipshit. Often, they’re a bit of both. The camera fluctuates between slowly tracking droll, dryly comic disagreements and propelling you through some truly suspenseful transgressions when the big bang of the plot really kicks in about halfway through. Its third act finally reveals its Western influences, with shadowy gunfights aplenty, but a touch of the absurd remains—and this is where the filmmaking sets itself apart. If the COVID angle of this movie wasn’t fresh and grimly hilarious enough, this ultimately ultraviolent, awkward, and thrilling third act serves to unite the subtext of the movie with action entertainment. My eyes were glued to the screen and I felt like I was seeing something new—frequently terrifying, horror-adjacent silhouette work with that biting ridiculousness Aster first enjoyed in Beau a couple years ago. So what if the 10-minute coda after is a bit of a comedown? It still fit the themes of the rest of the movie and wrapped up some key early imagery in a pathetically spot-on fashion. This town has tumbled down the rabbit hole that is the 2020s, filled with mass sickness, unwinnable politics, corporate takeover, and sellouts aplenty. Ari doesn’t have the solution, but I was poked enough by the provocations he created to leave with both a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach.

I have no idea whether Eddington is going to go down as another box-office bomb for Aster and A24 or a seminal text in the COVID saga when we’re looking back in 20 years. The movie asks the question if we’ll even be here in 20 years, or will we all have had it out with our neighbors and social media enemies (oh, brother) by then, or maybe invaded by some other country that’s smarter than us? Regardless, this was an insightful, energetic, and pretty rightfully bleak slice of yesteryear, but the craziest part of the movie was how much of this crap still infects our post-pandemic world. Again, that throwback to the unlikable people of those big ‘70s movies is a commendable risk, and of course one that the Coens still take, as well. Perhaps Aster is their spiritual successor, which would be fine with me because it doesn’t seem like they’re making more movies together anytime soon. I’m really curious about what the hell his next movie’s vibe will be.

I guess people probably won’t see this movie and will continue to be completely ignorant of how dumb we as Americans look. Maybe if we just destroy Twitter and Instagram, we’ll snap out of it and live on?? I don’t know.

8.5/10