Chris Knipp
08-14-2025, 11:55 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/EDD.jpg
JOAQUIN PHOENIX AND PEDRO PASCAL IN EDDINGTON
ARI ASTER: EDDINGTON (2025)
Aster's crazy, catchall 'Our Town' that ends in violence is a bore
Ari Aster has gone astray since his promising start as a maker of unusually interesting, gentrified horror movies that even a non-fan like me could love when a connoisseur of the genre took me to see them. He has been accompanied in his loss of direction by Joaquin Phoenix, that warhorse of an actor, who only seemed to be working so hard at first to make up for the tragic early demise of his more gifted brother River.
Aster's third film Beau Is Afraid was an exhausting, paranoid saga about a man (Phoenix, in the lead) struggling to get home to his mother. Despite that debacle, this year they are back together with Eddington, with Phoenix again in the lead in what seems like an attempt to say something about everything going wrong in America in 2020, the pandemic, police violence, racism, plus some local issues like relations with Native Americans and a giant new "online server farm" that will gobble up resources. The sheriff, called Joe Cross (Phoenix) doesn't want to wear a mask, but wants to become mayor in the place of Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The fictitious small New Mexico town of Eddington becomes increasingly violent, largely due to Joe Cross. Cross creates mayhem, like some motormouth lord of misrule, but there is mayhem already as Black Lives Matter brings disorder to this formerly placid town of which we learn little except that it is in New Mexico and used to have a copper mine. But it takes too long to get anywhere in this overlong slog of a misfire, whose tech aspects are good nonetheless, with Darius Khondji’s usually excellent cinematography and a generally pleasing score by Bobby Kiric and Daniel Pemberton.
Aster is only minimally capable of drawing the political and social portrait he is attempting here, but then as things go on he may be drifting toward a horror flick, which again might have been an interesting, offbeat one, if the depiction of both the current issues and the town weren't so clumsy. Never mind: anyway, the sheriff turns into a terrorist (though nobody seems to notice) and winds up a quadriplegic figurehead after a lot of mayhem. Some interesting actors have been woven in and out, Emma Stone as Louise, Phoenix's onscreen wife, Pascal, as mentioned - but both are underused; and varous others such as Cameron Mann as Brian, a charismatic young guy using political stances for gain, to impress a girl; and Austin Butler as Vernon, a strange young man who suddenly appears.
Vernon turns into a charismatic but deeply disturbed cult leader who develops a strong following in Eddington. Women like Louise, also with a troubled past, tied in with the current mayor, are drawn to his claims of recovered memories of child abuse and his belief in the existence of a powerful ring of pedophiles. Yes, conspiracy theories are another thing Aster throws into the mix. There is not much of a sense of proportion or a sense of pacing, and the pace lags at times, taking far too long to get going, and then exploding with ridiculous violence all of a sudden and only snowballing after that. And you wonder: does Aster really want to present these social and political issues seriously? In any case, aren't they all too fresh to be dealt with in a film? And the film is baggy, poorly structured and overlong.
The failure of this movie is signalled by the disappointment of its name actors, whose roles don't develop much depth. We are really bored with these issues, covid, vaccinations, masks, Black Lives Matter, imaginary pedophile cults, religious hucksterism, the undercurrent of social media distracting everyone and dangerously ramping up every issue - because they are all presented too superficially and insufficiently integrated with the lives and events of the town. It's often suggested that they don't really belong here, and the thing is that they don't, not all of them anyway, not all at once. And what is this town?
Eddington, the town, has no soul. There is a lingering feeling that it's not as small a town as it's represented as being. The filmmaking doesn't give a sense of its flavor or outlines. It is also difficult to believe Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Bundy, this sheriff with political ambitions. He's just the warhorse actor bravely soldiering through another role. It seems likely many viewers and reviewers have been drawn to this movie either for its topicality or its offbeat horror and been disappointed on both scores and bored by its excessive nearly two-and-a-half-hour length.
Maybe this story is one that could have been written, in another era, by the great E.L. Doctorow: one thinks of his amazing Welcome to Hard Times, the way he could dazzle with recreations of historical events melded into the everyday and sudden, dazzling shifts of mood from placid into violent. That seems to be what Aster is trying to do here, but it eludes him. Nice try, Ari: we'll see what comes next, and hope it goes better and you can overcome this losing streak.
Eddington, 148 mins., debuted at Cannes May 16, 2025,showing also at Neufchatel and Fantasia in Montreal, and Melbourne, released in many countries Aug.-Nov. 2025 in the US July 18. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/eddington/) rating: 64%.
JOAQUIN PHOENIX AND PEDRO PASCAL IN EDDINGTON
ARI ASTER: EDDINGTON (2025)
Aster's crazy, catchall 'Our Town' that ends in violence is a bore
Ari Aster has gone astray since his promising start as a maker of unusually interesting, gentrified horror movies that even a non-fan like me could love when a connoisseur of the genre took me to see them. He has been accompanied in his loss of direction by Joaquin Phoenix, that warhorse of an actor, who only seemed to be working so hard at first to make up for the tragic early demise of his more gifted brother River.
Aster's third film Beau Is Afraid was an exhausting, paranoid saga about a man (Phoenix, in the lead) struggling to get home to his mother. Despite that debacle, this year they are back together with Eddington, with Phoenix again in the lead in what seems like an attempt to say something about everything going wrong in America in 2020, the pandemic, police violence, racism, plus some local issues like relations with Native Americans and a giant new "online server farm" that will gobble up resources. The sheriff, called Joe Cross (Phoenix) doesn't want to wear a mask, but wants to become mayor in the place of Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). The fictitious small New Mexico town of Eddington becomes increasingly violent, largely due to Joe Cross. Cross creates mayhem, like some motormouth lord of misrule, but there is mayhem already as Black Lives Matter brings disorder to this formerly placid town of which we learn little except that it is in New Mexico and used to have a copper mine. But it takes too long to get anywhere in this overlong slog of a misfire, whose tech aspects are good nonetheless, with Darius Khondji’s usually excellent cinematography and a generally pleasing score by Bobby Kiric and Daniel Pemberton.
Aster is only minimally capable of drawing the political and social portrait he is attempting here, but then as things go on he may be drifting toward a horror flick, which again might have been an interesting, offbeat one, if the depiction of both the current issues and the town weren't so clumsy. Never mind: anyway, the sheriff turns into a terrorist (though nobody seems to notice) and winds up a quadriplegic figurehead after a lot of mayhem. Some interesting actors have been woven in and out, Emma Stone as Louise, Phoenix's onscreen wife, Pascal, as mentioned - but both are underused; and varous others such as Cameron Mann as Brian, a charismatic young guy using political stances for gain, to impress a girl; and Austin Butler as Vernon, a strange young man who suddenly appears.
Vernon turns into a charismatic but deeply disturbed cult leader who develops a strong following in Eddington. Women like Louise, also with a troubled past, tied in with the current mayor, are drawn to his claims of recovered memories of child abuse and his belief in the existence of a powerful ring of pedophiles. Yes, conspiracy theories are another thing Aster throws into the mix. There is not much of a sense of proportion or a sense of pacing, and the pace lags at times, taking far too long to get going, and then exploding with ridiculous violence all of a sudden and only snowballing after that. And you wonder: does Aster really want to present these social and political issues seriously? In any case, aren't they all too fresh to be dealt with in a film? And the film is baggy, poorly structured and overlong.
The failure of this movie is signalled by the disappointment of its name actors, whose roles don't develop much depth. We are really bored with these issues, covid, vaccinations, masks, Black Lives Matter, imaginary pedophile cults, religious hucksterism, the undercurrent of social media distracting everyone and dangerously ramping up every issue - because they are all presented too superficially and insufficiently integrated with the lives and events of the town. It's often suggested that they don't really belong here, and the thing is that they don't, not all of them anyway, not all at once. And what is this town?
Eddington, the town, has no soul. There is a lingering feeling that it's not as small a town as it's represented as being. The filmmaking doesn't give a sense of its flavor or outlines. It is also difficult to believe Joaquin Phoenix as Joe Bundy, this sheriff with political ambitions. He's just the warhorse actor bravely soldiering through another role. It seems likely many viewers and reviewers have been drawn to this movie either for its topicality or its offbeat horror and been disappointed on both scores and bored by its excessive nearly two-and-a-half-hour length.
Maybe this story is one that could have been written, in another era, by the great E.L. Doctorow: one thinks of his amazing Welcome to Hard Times, the way he could dazzle with recreations of historical events melded into the everyday and sudden, dazzling shifts of mood from placid into violent. That seems to be what Aster is trying to do here, but it eludes him. Nice try, Ari: we'll see what comes next, and hope it goes better and you can overcome this losing streak.
Eddington, 148 mins., debuted at Cannes May 16, 2025,showing also at Neufchatel and Fantasia in Montreal, and Melbourne, released in many countries Aug.-Nov. 2025 in the US July 18. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/eddington/) rating: 64%.