‘Eddington’ Review: Ari Aster’s Anti-Western Is a Pointed Snapshot of a Broken America

Not for nothing does Eddington arrive with the tagline “Hindsight is 2020.” Ari Aster’s film looks back at the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic not with the clear vision afforded by retrospection, but from the bottom of the rift that America is still stuck in. It’s a fissure that, as Aster sees it, cracked wide open the moment that polarized politics, social and educational failings, and social media brain rot came up against a make-or-break crisis.

In early 2020, the fictional New Mexico town of Eddington is mandating social distance and masking rules, and much to the chagrin of its asthmatic sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who thinks the concerns plaguing major metropolitan areas have no business intruding into the affairs of his one-horse burg. But Eddington isn’t as isolated from the problems of modernity as Joe believes. For one, a tech giant named solidgoldmagikarp, with the support of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is planning to build a massive data center just outside of town.

After Joe refuses to mask up at a local supermarket and an altercation ensues, the bad blood between him and Ted reaches a boiling point, with the sheriff vowing to unseat the incumbent mayor. Joe launches a campaign to restore good old-fashioned neighborliness and respectability back to Eddington but soon finds himself woefully out of his depth in trying to weather the social upheavals that have engulfed his once peaceful town. Even Joe’s home is a landmine, what with his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and mother-in-law, Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), having little to do in lockdown besides falling down conspiracy rabbit holes.

With its dusty streets and big New Mexico skies overhead, the eponymous town suggests something out of an old Hollywood western—a place out of time. Which makes it an inspired magnifying glass to the events of 2020. “That’s not a here problem,” says Joe at one point, ignorant to the fact that in the age of social media all problems are global ones.

Eddington is a disputed space, with frequent reference made to it being built on stolen land. And the town is a beehive of squabbles over jurisdictional matters involving other counties—an obvious discussion in microcosm about state-versus-individual rights redolent of the screaming matches that populated our news feeds at the height of the pandemic.

Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress. Aster asserts that, even in spite of increasing awareness of social media as a form of self-surveillance, people are behaving worse than ever before, and, in the director’s version of 2020, there are no good faith actors. Everything across the spectrum of politics and rationality, from support for the Black Lives Matter protests to the need to speak out against satanic cabals of child-traffickers, is exposed as coming from a mercenary desire or unresolved trauma rather than stated principles or genuine conviction.

Those seeking a political screed that toes the Democratic party line or crusades against the supposed sins of woke culture should look elsewhere. Aster is more interested in the ugly urges and personal dramas that define our outlook and deform us into the worst versions of ourselves for consumption on the nightly news or audiences of millions on TikTok.

Eddington, which could be seen as a companion piece to Hailey Gates’s Iraq War anti-satire Atropia about our collective inability to learn our lessons from epoch-defining historical calamities, doesn’t lack for subversions. The sheriff is typically the western genre’s symbol of absolute moral spotlessness, but Phoenix’s Joe is nothing if not pathetic—slow of speech and constantly frustrated in his attempts to act, unable to keep the peace in his home, let alone his town. Late in Eddington, he declares, “We are in the center of it now, we are in history.” Like a man caught in the eye of a hurricane, the sheriff can see the disaster unfolding around him but finds himself powerless to do anything about it, never mind be a hero.

That’s where Eddington starts and leaves us: in the eye of a storm that’s still raging. For all the disruptions wrought by Covid—the innumerable dead, the public health mishandlings, the social media freak-outs—little was learned and even less has changed. Through the citizens of Eddington, Aster demonstrates just how easy—even rewarding—it’s become to ignore our better angels in the social media age. Some would have us believe that America and its people can still find progress through the teachings of adversity, but Aster’s cynical anti-western is a grim reminder of just how thoroughly we’ve failed to meet the moment.