Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal Descend into Covid-Era Madness in ‘Eddington’

There’s certainly some Trumpism in there, but I don’t think Eddington is a Trump movie, really. It’s mostly a crime story adorned with political trappings. A better film would tightly synthesize the macro with the micro, but Aster instead lets them hang discordant next to one another, clanging in the desert wind. The boos I heard at the end of the press screening didn’t sound like ones of disagreement, but of dissatisfaction. Eddington’s setup promises a lot, but delivers mostly mayhem and confusion.

Then again, that feels apt enough as America struggles to reidentify—or reimagine—its purpose. Phoenix, who played a worrywart Aster stand-in in Beau Is Afraid, is adept at squalid humor like this. He ably plays a scrambling loser, complete with hacking Covid cough. Phoenix’s Joe is unpleasant to watch, which is the whole point. Pascal, meanwhile, doesn’t have much to do beyond delicate smarm, while Emma Stone—playing Joe’s addled wife—is handed a diminutive and genuinely gloomy storyline that feels out of place in Eddington’s archness.

Credit to Aster, though, for throwing bones to the grand dames of the New York stage. Beau Is Afraid made fantastic exploit of Patti LuPone, while Eddington shrewdly employs the great Deirdre O’Connell as Joe’s hectoring mother-in-law, Dawn. She’s a conspiracy junkie forever urging her daughter to do her own research into wild, absurd theories about shadowy cabals doing nefarious things. (Shadowy cabals certainly do exist in this sorry country—just not the ones that people like Dawn believe in.) O’Connell gets the tone and temperament of such a person exactly right, giving the impression of a hippie faded into libertarian delusion. It’s acute and darkly witty, unlike the film’s increasingly wheezy and outsized gags about Black Lives Matter allies and indigenous politics.

Aster is allowed his pessimism, his equal opportunity offense. But his brush is perhaps too broad; nuance gives way to Bill Maherian conclusions that everyone is wrong and stupid for caring at all. Given the humanism lingering in his work, I don’t think that’s actually how Aster views the world. Eddington, though, verges on crankism; it’s a film whose anger is sourced in exasperation. It’s grimly telling that the film’s best parts are when it devolves into an anarchic shooting spree. There, maybe, is America’s terminal end: guns blazing away in a now-permanent night.

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