Edding­ton – first-look review

Up front: I am not the world’s biggest Ari Aster boost­er. You might even say I was a tad Ari-nos­tic about his over-com­mit­ted and insis­tent works that, if noth­ing else, are coloured by the fact that the suc­cess of his 2018 fea­ture debut, Hered­i­tary, has allowed him to work freely from the tra­di­tion­al con­stants of the Hol­ly­wood machine. 

With Edding­ton, it feels a lit­tle like he’s wound his own leash in a tiny bit fol­low­ing the aggres­sive­ly indul­gent, pseu­do-Freudi­an clus­ter­fuck that was 2023’s Beau is Afraid, but this new one comes across as if the film­mak­er is try­ing once more to force a litany of good ideas, sol­id ideas and some bad ideas in a jar that just doesn’t have space to fit them all.

Amer­i­ca was already some way down the road of auto-destruct by the year 2020, with Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump hav­ing already pounced on the con­ve­nient capac­i­ty of elec­tron­ic media to obscure the nature of com­mon-sense truth. In the sleepy town­ship of Edding­ton, New Mex­i­co, sher­iff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) refus­es to employ his state-man­dat­ed pow­ers to enforce mask usage dur­ing the ear­ly days of the Covid-19 pan­dem­ic, see­ing the glob­al pan­dem­ic which laid waste to mil­lions of lives as some­body else’s prob­lem. No-one has it in Edding­ton, so maybe it doesn’t exist?

Incum­bent may­or of Edding­ton, Ted Gar­cia (Pedro Pas­cal), mean­while, demands that Cross put his unhelp­ful per­son­al beliefs aside and pro­mote pub­lic safe­ty dur­ing this unprece­dent­ed moment. Though he may be respon­si­ble for slick, manip­u­la­tive cam­paign videos and seems like an intel­lec­tu­al­ly reli­able and empa­thet­ic polit­i­cal can­di­date, Gar­cia, it tran­spires, is mere­ly a pawn for the wider par­ty, but also for shady big tech inter­ests who want to open a resource-sap­ping serv­er farm on his territory.

When Cross decides that his per­son­al lib­er­ty has been taint­ed to the point of indig­na­tion, he decides on a whim to run a grass­roots cam­paign against Gar­cia, opt­ing to whip up his blind­ly recep­tive online-fol­low­ing with slan­der and back-bit­ing rather than play by the rules. Mean­while, his wid­owed moth­er-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) has gone full QAnon with her vora­cious inges­tion and par­rot­ing of online con­spir­a­cies, while his clear­ly-truama­tised wife Louise (Emma Stone) is on an anti-pae­dophile jag with the help of Austin Butler’s tattoo’d rightwing svengali.

This is the basic set-up of the film, and across an admirably light-foot­ed 2 hours and 15 min­utes it charts the incre­men­tal (but per­haps inevitable) process of Amer­i­can degra­da­tion via its to-do list of sacred cow tar­gets. These range from fer­vent 2^nd Amend­ment cham­pi­ons, small gov­ern­ment pro­po­nents and shady white suprema­cists to BLM pro­test­ers, White sav­iour com­plex types and even Antifa, who in this world are por­trayed as an elite, well-fund­ed com­man­do unit post­ed by pri­vate jet to take down spe­cif­ic irri­tant tar­gets. With Joe’s spi­ralling, ide­o­log­i­cal­ly-dri­ven antics now receiv­ing nation­al cov­er­age, he duly courts the ire of the Antifa enforcers.

Edding­ton is a deeply cyn­i­cal film for deeply cyn­i­cal times, and if you’re look­ing to find a hero to root for in this fucked-up fres­co, then you need to keep on walk­ing. Per­haps the clos­est we come to a locus for empa­thy is Micheal Ward’s new­ly mint­ed police-sergeant Michael, who is trapped between work­ing for a racist, igno­rant, self-serv­ing men­ace, and his white mil­len­ni­al ex-girl­friend who has at the front of BLM protests and wants him to join the as a Black offi­cer who acknowl­edges the rot in the system. 

This avowed­ly switched-on film is gor­geous­ly shot by the great Dar­ius Khond­ji and packed to the gills with east­er-egg like gags which empha­sise how the col­lec­tive brain-rot that comes from obses­sive post­ing has almost reached Def­con One. The film cer­tain­ly is rare in actu­al­ly offer­ing an authen­tic depic­tion of social media and its nox­ious capa­bil­i­ties, even if its insis­tence on prov­ing there’s no right­eous moral that can’t be swift­ly liq­ui­dat­ed does become a lit­tle tire­some by the home stretch. Phoenix, as ever, com­mits to the bit and then some, and he keeps his gal­lon-hat sport­ing tin­pot dem­a­gogue anchored with enough down­home charm to keep you sec­ond-guess­ing his motives.

I wouldn’t say that Ari Aster has entire­ly won me over with the full buf­fet, amuse bouche, entrées, two deserts, cig­ars, diges­tifs and petit fours that is Edding­ton, but the nee­dle is set clos­er to zero for his next mad­cap, every­thing-and-the-kitchen-sink offer­ing slides down the chute.

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