Image Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.
Ari Aster’s star-studded contemporary western Eddington takes place in a fictional city of the same name, sometime during the early Covid-19 pandemic. The movie is a hindsight piece on 2020, and rather than pushing the chaos into parody, it starts off amusing and slowly takes on a darker edge with hysteria.
As events spiral into farce, the story is less concerned with realism than it is with recognition: “Yes, this happened”. The city of Eddington feels like a closed circuit, populated by characters numbed by too much screen time and too little touch. Everyone seems to be absorbing a constant flood of content, panic, opinion, and moral performance.
We see Joaquin Phoenix as an unusual sheriff who might have been the town’s oddball, if it weren’t for his uniform and patrol car. He is absolutely adoring his wife Louise, hilariously played by Emma Stone, who manages to bring out a character who is suffering yet in a way that makes us laugh, but only very quietly. Louise and the sheriff live together with Louise’s mom, played by Deirdre O’Connell, who excellently brings the contradiction to the surface: the ridiculousness of conspiracy theories, yet how deeply her character believes in and feels connected to those things.
"An interesting detail is Eddington’s subtle yet impactful score. It’s unsettling without being overt, perfectly supporting the emotional shifts that span across scenes — translating tension, disorientation, and irony without ever overwhelming them."
Pedro Pascal as Ted Garcia, the mayor who is a self-absorbed character oscillating somewhere between a good Samaritan and a cunning manipulator. Austin Butler comes as half-meme, half-messiah, a prophet whose charisma is built on conspiracy. Aster shows how quickly falsehoods mutate into fact when shared at scale: We clicked. We shared. We believed.
A strong performance comes from German actor Amélie Hoeferle, who portrays a character fervently protesting and passionately opinionated about climate change and white supremacy. Yet her intense focus and self-centeredness create the impression that she is numb to her own voice.
Ari Aster succeeds in bringing such a recent history to the screen, exposing its surface-level ridiculousness and the slow-moving dread underneath. But as the film unfolds, the richness of Aster’s screenplay begins to feel overwhelming. With the multitude of topics it touches, Eddington starts to resemble a multi-headed hydra, impossible to follow or defeat. We are left caught in a failed discourse, a chaotic dialogue in which everyone seems to shout at once, leaving no space for resolution. The film doesn’t deliver a clear narrative, instead it leaves behind a single, panicked question: Wtf is wrong with us?
Image Courtesy of Cannes Film Festival.
Although Eddington has landed in the bottom of Screen’s Cannes jury grid which is a strong indicator of the winners since long, this movie has still much to offer. The movie is shot by the two time Oscar nominated cinematographer Darius Khondji whose choice of the aspect ratio gives another hint regarding Ari Aster’s intention while creating this movie. They do not use the 2.39:1 aspect ratio which would be the “to-go” for many classical western films. Instead they use the 1.85:1 which is widely used in thrillers, comedy and documentaries. No need to say that Eddingtons visuals are impressive and may bring Darius another Oscar nomination.
An interesting detail is Eddington’s subtle yet impactful score. It’s unsettling without being overt, perfectly supporting the emotional shifts that span across scenes — translating tension, disorientation, and irony without ever overwhelming them
In the end, Eddington doesn’t mock our recent history, rather studies it. The movie sits with discomfort, and dares us to remember.