How many times in the past few years have you heard, or used, the expression “The pandemic broke our brains”? Particularly in less densely populated parts of America, plenty of government officials and citizens still hold a grudge over the way businesses and schools were temporarily shut down. In some places, mask-wearing is still treated as a sign of wimpiness. Parents blame their kids’ social awkwardness or inability to keep up in school on the “lost” years of education over Zoom. Forget that COVID-19 actually killed people, and that some who survived still suffer lingering effects. The pandemic is the global event we just can’t let go, a handy scapegoat for people’s anger over how and why their lives aren’t exactly as they’d like them to be.
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How did we get here? That’s the question writer-director Ari Aster’s somber comedy-Western Eddington, playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival, appears to be asking. The story opens in late May 2020. Major cities like New York were already facing frightening death tolls that climbed higher each day—but that’s not what Eddington is about. It’s set in the (fictional) city of Eddington, NM, where the local sheriff, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe Cross, tools around town responding to minor crises like noise complaints. He has a wife he adores, Emma Stone’s Louise, who wiles away her days making whimsically creepy dolls; she even manages to sell some once in a while, though it turns out Joe is paying friends-of-friends to buy them. She’s also emotionally fragile, and some unspecified trauma has caused her to have zero interest in sex. It doesn’t help that her overbearing mother, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), has moved into the couple’s cozy Southwestern-style home, toting along a figurative suitcase of conspiracy theories.
Joe is stressed at home and annoyed at work. He’s basically a decent guy, but you get the sense he’s ready to blow. He hates the recently established local mask mandates: An asthmatic, he claims that wearing a mask prevents him from breathing properly, oblivious to the fact that his asthma makes him more susceptible to serious COVID complications. But what he hates more than masks is the town’s sanctimonious mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who’s up for reelection. Ted is promising a “tech-positive future” for the city, but that really just means opening an AI deep learning facility that will gobble up resources and ultimately put real, live, thinking people out of work, though he’s also pro-wind and solar power. He’s one of those guys who’ll put his stamp on anything, as long as he thinks it will make him look good.
It’s easy to see why he drives Joe crazy. And in a fit of pique one day, Joe decides to enter the mayoral race himself. He enlists the help of his two loyal deputies, Michael (Micheal Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes), to figure out the requirements. He carefully makes his own signage, decorating his sheriffmobile like an elaborate circus wagon. (The signs have a confident, professional look, made by a guy whose enthusiasm is greater than his knowledge of punctuation and grammar. One reads “Your Being Manipulated.”) And he proceeds to both annoy and destroy his opponent, who’s such a glad-handing windbag you don’t mind seeing him being taken down a peg or two. (Pascal is good at playing these types of sleazy charmers.) One of his campaign commercials shows him laughing and smiling with random Black citizens, in numbers larger than the city’s actual Black population. Joe wonders aloud if he’s had them shipped in.
But Joe’s droll swagger can’t hide the fact that he’s beginning to fall apart. Louise has fallen under the spell of a slippery self-help guru, played by a buttery-smooth Austin Butler; there’s another complication in that she and Ted have a sexual history together, though Ted denies it. Just as Joe launches his campaign, the murder of George Floyd spurs protests around the country, and not even little Eddington is spared. Small bands of protesters gather, brandishing Black Lives Matter signs. They mean well, but there’s hypocrisy there too. In one of the movie’s most cutting lines of dialogue, an insufferable white liberal do-gooder, played by Amélie Hoeferle, scolds Michael, who is Black (and whom she briefly dated), for not taking to the streets in protest. “I haven’t experienced racism, but you have,” she tells him, practically poking her finger in his chest. There will always be white people who just can’t stop themselves from telling Black people how they ought to feel.
Eddington is an intelligent, questioning movie. But Aster just tries to pack in too much. He jabs at the sometimes-questionable veracity of recovered-memory syndrome. He’s annoyed, justifiably, by the way activists with good intentions can be so piously bullying they can actually drive you away from a cause. The plot spirals into murder and mayhem; it takes way too much time to wrap up. And I have almost no clue what the ending means, though there’s a great sight gag of three unlikely people crowding into one queen-size bed as if it were simply business as usual.
As a filmmaker, Aster is two parts visionary to one part irritant. He knows how to translate his ideas into evocative visuals: in his terror-round-the-maypole reverie Midsommar, Florence Pugh wears a flower crown made of what appear to be blinking, breathing, sentient flowers—the effect is creepy and beautiful at once. Beau Is Afraid is an ode to human neuroses in movie form, and if it’s wearisome by the end, its opening sequence is wickedly brilliant, a shaggy-dog rondelay in which a hapless New Yorker (played by Phoenix) encounters, in a span of minutes, the worst of all Manhattan has to offer, from neighbors bitterly complaining about nonexistent noise to a crew of dirty, crazy-eyed street people pouring into his apartment for an impromptu hootenanny of debauchery.
Aster has so many ideas he doesn’t know when to stop, which is why it’s easy to lose patience with his movies. And while he has a sense of humor about his own neuroses, he’s often guilty of oversharing. But he’s observant about the way humans interact, and about their tendency to let their fears and insecurities rule them. And he’s clear-eyed about the ways even well-meaning people can do horrible things if they’re pushed to the breaking point. One of the strengths of Eddington is that even though it’s a story about people preoccupied with politics, and a society under great strain, the last thing Aster wants to do is lecture us. Some of the movie’s views may be his own, but mostly it seems drawn from weird, aggravating, or poignant behavior he’s observed firsthand. (It’s worth noting that while Aster was born a New Yorker, he spent much of his childhood living with his family in New Mexico.) And the movie’s score, by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton, is wonderful: there are sweeping passages of Elmer Bernstein-like jauntiness. If this wigged-out modern Western doesn’t quite work, it’s at the very least a cry of vexation over what our country, messy at the best of times, has become, thanks to a virus that found its way not just into our lungs, but into our very lifeblood. Dr. Aster has listened in on America’s heartbeat; the diagnosis is that we’re basically a mess.