Eddington (2025)

2 hours 29 minutes, R for Joaquin Phoenix going full frontal

Fair Value of Eddington: $4. I’m having difficulty reviewing this film after only one sitting. It’s engaging but not entertaining, urgent, evocative of other dark contemporary Westerns like No Country for Old Men or Sicario but somehow even grimmer and less fun. Too many sub-plots disrupt the tension, and tonal shifts make it hard to grasp.

Just Because You’re Paranoid Doesn’t Mean They’re Not After You. Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is a small county sheriff coming apart during the COVID-19 Epidemic. He’s an anti-masker in rural New Mexico who decides to run a mayoral campaign against the slick liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal, Mr. Ubiquitous for 2025). But things are unraveling in multiple calamities at once: his wife (Emma Stone) and mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) are falling deep into conspiracy theory/ Qanon rabbit holes, a powerful tech firm is hellbent on building a new data center outside of town, and the racial tensions are boiling over in the Black Lives Matter protests. And things get worse from there, because it just may be that some of the conspiracies are explaining the mysterious men in black tactical armor that start showing up halfway through the film.

Who is this film perfect for? People who like their Westerns to be as maximally grim and dark as possible. If you’re a fan of things like The Great Silence, or you like the Joel Cohen’s work (A Serious Man, No Country for Old Men), Ari Aster’s paranoia fried deconstruction of a patriarch might be engaging.

Who Will Hate this film? People who don’t want to live through a medley of all of the worst parts of 2020; indeed, you might even experience some residual PTSD. Eddington is a deeply unpleasant film, not unlike being locked into a Thanksgiving dinner with all of your least favorite family members on their worst behavior for three hours. There’s enough fragility, dishonesty, paranoia, racism for anyone. Ari Aster leaves no character innocent- if you weren’t a misanthrope before Eddington, you might come out of the theater as one. Fun is the last thing to be found in Eddington.

Why Does This Film Fail? Ari Aster has an excellent cast: Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone do tremendously in particular, but Michael Ward (as a young black deputy) and William Belleau (as Butterfly Jimenez, a tribal policeman at the reservation) also deserve note. What fails about this movie is the tonal transitions: it starts out as a small-town comedy, shifts to being something more like Breaking Bad, and then shifts over into a paranoid Parallax View style conspiracy film. This might work if there was an antagonist that paired well with Phoenix’s overwhelmed Sheriff Joe; but alas, anonymous “Antifa” doesn’t cut it. There’s no moment of exposition that relieves the characters or the audience of their confusion, and thus there is no catharsis, only a modern Southwestern recap of the brutality of McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

This is not a film dealing with racial tensions with the fluency and adroitness of a Spike Lee or a James Baldwin. By comparison, Ari Aster is an anthropologist and a tourist, smugly looking down on the foibles of small-town Americans. At least the Coen Brothers have the life experience to give their similar films a touch of authenticity. Aster is just pitiless, his script abounding in shrill effigies that evoke no sympathy or patience in the viewer.

 I spent forty-five minutes of this film thinking it was a very dry comedy, and waiting for it to get funny. Then I spent another forty-five minutes of this film thinking it a suspense film in the manner of Fargo or Breaking Bad, and I waited for it to get tense. I spent the last forty-five minutes getting some action and some paranoia, but by that point I spent forty-five minutes waiting for the film to end. After I get to my final draft, I no more want to spend time with this film than I would want to relive 2020. This is a bitter, dry, dark film that’s only suitable for some rarefied tastes. As such, it would be a terrible choice for dates or for friends or families. For enthusiasts of unremitting bleakness only.