Written and Directed by Ari Aster | 148 min | ▲▲▲▲
The hum around this picture out of Cannes was polarized — some admired its ambition, some hated it outright. Filmmaker Ari Aster has been challenging the affection of audiences since the success of his one-two horror punch of Hereditary and Midsommar. Then came Beau Is Afraid, an indulgent, occasionally inspired, sprawling and surreal drama about a man, his mother, and his anxiety. This time out Aster has mashed up genres to say something about recent American experience, and in that he’s made a film Americans should see, even if it makes them uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable, but the movie’s staying in my head.
Aster reconnects with his Beau lead, Joaquin Phoenix, who once again delivers a compromised character, his specialty. Joe Cross is the Sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico, in May 2020. There’s a masking mandate that he refuses to enforce, to the chagrin of small business owners and the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who seems a whole lot more progressive and evolved than Joe.
But not so fast — neither man is squeaky clean. We see Ted’s parenting fails with his teenaged son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka). Joe’s homelife is more complicated — his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), is recovering slowly from some unnamed trauma, and his live-in mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell), is a conspiracy nut, the paranoia dripping down to her daughter. Enter online charismatic weirdo, Vernon (Austin Butler in a cameo).
How this atmosphere affects Joe and the way he does his job is one of the mysteries the movie leaves us to parse — Phoenix delivers rich character work here. Joe’s well-meaning but naive, susceptible to social influence and manipulation. When he decides to run for mayor himself it rapidly worsens his marriage.
Compounding the issues in this desert town is the death of George Floyd — groups of white kids, led by a teenager and social justice warrior named Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), congregate on the street with their Black Lives Matter placards and internet-fuelled performative outrage. The youth culture in this town lives on phones — what else is there to do? — with photos shared and jealousies transferred. Joe’s deputy, an African American young man, Michael (Micheal Ward), is part of the that scene, and provides Joe a convenient beard for any accusations of racism directed at the Sheriff’s office, until such time as he needs a scapegoat.
The violence waiting in this film’s third act is predictable, but inevitable. Everyone has guns in this town, and with all the pressure points here you know someone’s going to get shot — that’s where a lot of the suspense lies. That’s not to say you couldn’t imagine the very same thing happening in New England, but while this is formally a satire streaked with dark comedy and a ’70’s style paranoid thriller, it’s also a western, playing with the iconography of that genre — the outlaw, the frontiersman, the sidearm, the showdown.
Things go a little off the rails in the third act. Until that point Eddington feels almost like an unnerving docudrama, like this could’ve happened IRL given this set of circumstances — with echoes of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, John Sayles’ Lonestar, and Robert Altman’s Nashville — but then a wildly implausible outside party arrives to trigger something closer to the original First Blood. The film provides three points where it could end in the final 25 minutes, and I would’ve been happier with the earliest one.
That said, for the first time from Ari Aster this feels like the work of a genuine activist filmmaker, a provocateur, and that approach suits him. Hopefully we’ll get more of the same down the road.
