In the Flesh: Eddington

Here’s a living corpse, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), brain bisected by a hunting knife, nervous system ravaged by COVID, propped up in a motorized wheelchair. He’s the mayor, by default, of a small New Mexico town called Eddington. He has committed, and escaped responsibility for, outrageous crimes. He has survived a shootout with a tech conglomerate kill team impersonating Antifa commandos. He has screamed at a child, manhandled her, and been caught on video doing so. Now, motionless and non-verbal in that padded chair, he must watch a cult leader impregnate his ex-wife, Louise (Emma Stone). He must lay in bed in total silence while his revolting conspiracy theorist mother-in-law (Deirdre O'Connell) fools around with his handsome young nurse a few feet away. He has torn his town apart with his moronic, unprincipled words and actions, left it beholden to an absent and deeply unserious tech billionaire whose company name, SolidGoldMagikarp, leaves little doubt as to which real-world jagoff director Ari Aster is invoking, and now he floats through the aftermath as a puppet authority figure, powerless and broken, sputtering insensible rubbish to his uncaring guardians.

Remind you of anything?

To boil Aster’s ambitious fourth film, Eddington, down to a simple story about Trump and Trumpism, though, is to do it a disservice. It’s a film about incoherence. It’s a film about the human mind operating on the most tenuous frontier of its capacity to sort and process information. Right wingers like Cross and his mother-in-law grumble about deepfakes and AI forgeries while paving the way for SolidGoldMagikarp’s water-sucking, air-poisoning data center. They babble half-understood political messaging picked up in conversation or in passing, and as stress mounts they cast their mental net wider and wider. At one point Joe begins raving about whether or not he’s being “called”, regurgitating the conspiracy theories and cult propaganda his wife and mother-in-law so eagerly consume. Struggling in his marriage, he begins a mayoral campaign speech by outing his wife as a survivor of sexual abuse at the hands of incumbent mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), which she then proceeds to publicly deny before leaving him for Recovered Memory cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler). None of these people really understand why they’re doing anything, or where it might lead. 

Aster’s panicked, claustrophobic camerawork imparts a feeling of uncomfortable intimacy. His straightforward presentation of screens within the film feels effortlessly real. Joe curled up in bed, washed in the blue light of his laptop, feels especially well-observed, a sort of modern day Norman Rockwell-ism. While Eddington’s color palette is desaturated, it’s done thoughtfully, and the resultant washed-out blues, grays, tans, and whites give the film the look of one of O’Keeffe’s famous landscapes: desolate, but vibrantly so. A shot of Joe framed against the sky by the branches of the juniper trees in Garcia’s driveway manages to convey the impression that perhaps everyone we’ve met so far is not just unwell and out of control, but irradiated by constant exposure to the New Mexico sun. Eddington is a film as visually thoughtful as it is insightful about the plague of delusion, madness, directionless rage, and craven opportunism sweeping America. The emptiness and lack of real principle driving establishment liberals, the hopeless, helpless rage and confusion of young people, the libidinal, hyperviolent cruelty of the Right — it’s all a swirling nightmare into which Aster plunges us face-first, and there’s no waking up.