March 2020 seemed to last a year. That was the month the Covid-19 pandemic exploded across America. Events were canceled, in-person gatherings were either discouraged or outright banned, and “social distancing” entered the lexicon. Those who could work from home did, and those who couldn’t were given what sparse personal protection equipment was available. With the normal rhythms of life disrupted, time seemed to stretch on and on in an undifferentiated blur.
There hasn’t been a lot of art made about the pandemic era, besides Bo Burnham’s acclaimed Inside, but in retrospect, maybe that shouldn’t have been a surprise. For one thing, the last major pandemic, the 1918 influenza outbreak which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide, didn’t inspire much art besides the silent vampire film Nosferatu. Five years removed from Covid, maybe it’s easier to see why that’s the case. That period was so awful, people just don’t want to think about it.
It’s not for lack of material. Faced with months of enforced inactivity, every artist on the planet either started something new or dusted off that old, unfinished project they had shelved years ago. The latter is what seems to have happened to Ari Aster’s Eddington. The Hereditary and Midsommar director’s latest began life as a neo-Western which he revamped during lockdown.
The film begins in May 2020 — which, mentally was still March — in the small town of Eddington, New Mexico. As the great novelist and writing teacher John Gardner once observed, there are only two basic beginnings to stories: A person goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. In this case, the stranger coming to Eddington is Covid and it arrives as a barefoot homeless person (Clifton Collins Jr.) ranting and raving about some imagined injustice between rasping coughs. We meet the town’s sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), when he is confronted by a Pueblo reservation police officer named Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) because he is not wearing a mask.
During the early days of the pandemic, no one knew exactly how the virus was spread. Conventional epidemiology suggested that respiratory viruses like flu and the coronaviruses which cause the common cold went from person to person via droplets of saliva which settled out of the air within six or seven feet. Thus, the mania for hand washing and social distancing, and the early belief that masks were strictly necessary as long as you kept your distance. Now, after years of extremely focused research, it’s clear that the virus spreads almost exclusively via aerosolized mists which can hang in stagnant air for hours. This means that masks were the only way to stop the virus. If you want to prevent more airborne viral pandemics from happening, the best way to do it is to put a HEPA filter-quipped air purifier in every home and indoor public space.
But in May 2020, this was not yet known, and there was no vaccine to prime the immune systems against the novel virus. While that month saw bodies piling up in makeshift morgues in New York City, things looked pretty normal in Eddington. To Cross, the demands put on his community by Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) look like an insane power grab. But to the mayor, they look like common-sense precautions against a looming threat which would ultimately claim more than 1.5 million American lives.
Turns out, Mayor Garcia and Sheriff Cross have a long-standing beef. Garcia once briefly dated Louise (Emma Stone) who later married Cross. But the Crosses’ marriage is not a happy one. Her mental health is not good during the best of times, and with the stresses of the pandemic at their max, she’s all but bedridden. Her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) is living with the couple after Louise’s father died (possibly of Covid) and, like so many others, she has fallen down an internet rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. Dawn’s morning reading material includes rants about “Jesuit educated governor Gavin Newsom” and “The Crimes of the Federal Reserve: Why the Sinking of the Titanic Was No Accident.”
Dawn introduces Louise to her favorite YouTube personality, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), whose paranoid sermons have graduated to full-blown Mansonoid cult leader. Meanwhile, when the new town vagrant tries to barge into a masked and distanced city council meeting Garcia hosts in the town’s only bar, Sheriff Cross loses his temper. Why are they allowed to gather when businesses are failing? It’s because they’re discussing important town business, namely the potential for new investment by a company known as SolidGoldMagikarp in a giant data center on the outskirts of town.
Later, Cross is called to the grocery store, where a fellow anti-masker is pitching a fit after being denied entry. The confrontation escalates until Cross reaches a breaking point. This mayor has got to go, and Cross is just the person to put him out of a job. He announces his candidacy in the most 2020 way possible: a vertical video filmed while he’s at the wheel of his truck.
The brilliant parts of Eddington happen in the first two-thirds of the film. There’s a little bit of Robert Altman’s Nashville in the way Aster introduces a sprawling cast and quickly gives them motivations and flaws which set them on collision courses with both reality and each other. And like Nashville, this is partly a dark comedy. Mayor Garcia’s campaign commercial is perfectly tone-deaf. When the police killing of George Floyd sparks the Black Lives Matter protests, Cross and his two deputies are caught completely off-balance, and their botched reactions to the small group of earnest young people who take to what pass for Eddington’s streets only serves to escalate the situation. One recurring gag is the way that people discover extreme public statements are encouraged and amplified by social media. Cross has to keep escalating his rhetoric to keep attention on his campaign. Eventually, the chorus of people talking past each other leads to murder.
And that’s roughly when the wheels come off Eddington. As the violence escalates, the narrative spirals into nonsense. Aster has made two-thirds of a good movie. He deserves credit for skillfully capturing the mental chaos of the Longest March, but it’s too long, and he can’t quite tie the threads together for a satisfying ending — kinda like the pandemic itself.
Eddington
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