THB #731: Eddington (spoiler-free)

a comparison I will deny in the review… but…

I don’t think Eddington is a western… any more than Roadrunner and Coyote movies are westerns (and the score… mostly).

I don’t think Eddington is about COVID.

I don’t think Eddington is about politics, right or left.

Eddington is not even, ultimately, a movie about a showdown between 2 men, as 1 of the 2 men we would assume to be in that face-off is not really involved with the 3rd act of the film.

Everything that Eddington tells you that it is about early in the film turns out to be misdirection, in terms of story, but more specifically, in the story of Joe Cross, a man in a marriage to a broken woman, forced to live with her mother as well, stuck in a job that once meant something, but which has become a burden as he no longer how the status that being a town sheriff in a tiny town once was.

Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is a man who is constantly arguing over his control of everything in his life, thus showing his weakness and his control of nothing.

The most obvious disconnection is Sheriff Cross’ insistence on not submitting to wearing a mask during COVID, even with a state mandate and his role a the top law enforcement officer in his tiny town… but he has asthma, making him amongst the most susceptible to a deadly response to catching COVID. But that’s only the beginning.

The movie really follows the loss of control and the constant doubling-down of Sheriff Cross as he seeks to regain that lost ground. Everything else is - as dramatic, satiric, and extreme as it does become - secondary to Joe’s journey.

The ultimate threat to Joe is the future. The major representation of this is solidgoldmagikarp, a massive data center that the town’s Mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) is leading the way towards bringing to Eddington. The argument against it is that it will eat Eddington whole. But many/most believe this is for the best, even if there are concerns about the data center consuming the local natural resources in an outsized way… especially by the Native Americans who still own the lands right next to and around Eddington. Regardless, it is the future coming and this is not a safe thing for Joe.

There is little indication of the town being limited in a really problematic way by COVID regulations, except for a few anti-maskers along the way. Sheriff Joe complains about the Mayor having a meeting in his Main Street bar, which has been officially shut down by the COVID rules… even though Joe clearly thinks that the bar shouldn’t be closed in the first place.

We will later find that in this tiny town, Joe’s anger at the Mayor is much more personal than professional or philosophical. Joe’s anger at everything is is much more personal than professional or philosophical

The young people of this tiny town are mostly non-committal about politics, but George Floyd’s murder compels some of them to take to the street (singular intended) and protest… again pushing Sheriff Joe’s sense of control, even if there is barely anything to control.

The film takes it shots at the passion of young protesters, some of whom are really just trying to get laid, and others of the “what have you got to protest?” school. This seems to have set off a bunch of people taking the film personally at Cannes. Thin-skinned of them, I would say… but they will eventually have more concrete (or lead) things to complain about.

In the 2nd act, all of the desperate chasing of control, at home, in his town, and in his sense of order, by Sheriff Joe leads to him entering the mayoral race against the only other candidate, the current Mayor, Ted Garcia.

And that is when the movie takes the big turn. Very much like a roadrunner cartoon for adults, The Coyote gets pulled into the snowball (which makes no literal sense in a desert landscape) and cannot stop rolling downhill as the snowball gets bigger and bigger and bigger, taking all and any control.

Sheriff Joe is The Coyote and the world is The Roadrunner that he has made up in his head.

What started in the beginning of the film with grimaces and complaints and general whining progresses to a slander that backfires on a level that only a customer of the Acme Company might experience.

But as desperate as Sheriff Joe is to get control back, he can’t do the one thing that could help him regain order… taking responsibility for his own choices. Instead, this further loss of control causes him to double down, repeatedly, with increasing speed. And in doing so, he not only assures that he will not be able to recover from his slide, but that he will trigger and manifest the real-life version of the things he was unnecessarily paranoid about in his town up until his own actions.

And that, I believe, is what Eddington is really about. It is a phenomenon of this era. It is the inability to stop once we know - or should know - that we are on a path that is not good or safe for us. The only defense, Joe seems to instinctively embody, is an increasingly aggressive offense.

But what we see in Eddington is that not everyone can afford that path of relentless aggression. What we see in Eddington is unintended consequences, occurring over and over.

The politics of the movie are not really very political. There is Joe’s mother-in-law, played wonderfully by Deidre O’Connell, who is a conspiracy theorist to the max. But as passionate as she is about her theories, she doesn’t seem to take it personally. She never seems to feel a need to force others or herself to action. And when faced with real-life human issues, she attends to them ahead of her fears… often with exquisite selfishness. But she is not the car wreck that Joe becomes in the film.

I have seen and heard people complain about the small role in the film that Emma Stone fills. No doubt, she wanted to work with Ari Aster. And yes, it is a relatively minor role that is a bit odd for the audience coming from a recent 2-time Oscar winner. But she is, for all of her brevity and limited range of emotions in the film, a key conduit between the 3 leading men of the film… Sheriff Joe, Mayor Ted, and the cult leader, Vernon Peak, as well as her father, the long-time Sheriff of the town before Joe. Will she ever be happy? Perhaps only with a man of absolute self-assurance… even if a man of absolute self-assurance is what broke her in the first place.

The other key character, for me, is Micheal Ward’s Micheal, a Sheriff’s Deputy - one of two, he is book-ended in multiple ways by Luke Grimes - who feels the pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps when it is clear that he would be much better served by getting out of this tiny town where you can count people of color - of which he is one - on one hand. This character is trying to make sense of it all… to find the safe middle for everyone, even if he has to give up some of his own comfort. But he will learn, in a variety of ways,. that there is no middle when people are pushing to their extremes.

(PS I also love Clifton Collins, Jr’s “Lodge,” having not recognized him the first time I saw the movie and soon after I was thinking, “the actor playing this part is great,” realizing it was him. Ha.)

Looking at this “First Look” trailer, I feel like A24 has been sending people off in the wrong directions intentionally from early on.

I felt I needed to see the movie a 2nd time before reviewing and really, I could easily watch it a couple more times before really settling into how I feel. I think this review captures the true spirit of the film with a lot of the side elements really being distractions from the core, which is Sheriff Joe, not his competition with Mayor Ted.

Everything is in Joe’s way in this film… nothing more than Joe himself.

Is it a masterpiece? Maybe. Ask me after I see it a couple more times. Honestly, I think I was distracted by all the piece of the film when I saw it the first time, catching some of the nuance and losing some of it to the freshness of a first viewing. But when a filmmaker of this caliber is working, one of my focuses is, “Why did they make this specific choice?” If a choice doesn’t make 100% sense to me, it doesn’t mean that I need to come to love it, but I do feel I need to find a peace with the reason why this very intentional filmmaker made it.

I love Cannes, but as an experience for film critics, I find it infuriating because nothing has the time to settle in. Everyone is on insta-deadline and quickly turned opinions of complex work are almost always wrong, for better and for worse.

So I will try to see Eddington a third time this week. I have to say, trying to get a seat in LA on the weekend was actually challenging… a few seats here and there and the front rows. It may not be a hit everywhere, but like Materialists, A24 found a film that city dwellers feel compelled to come out for. Huzzah to that.

Until tomorrow…