On Screen: “Eddington”
Eddington
Ari Aster’s snarky Western thriller “Eddington” is my #1 nominee for the dullest, dreariest, most disappointing film — so far in 2025.
Set in the (fictional) desert settlement of Eddington, New Mexico, it focuses on incompetent, asthmatic Sevilla County Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), who adamantly refuses to wear a mask during the lockdown summer of 2020 when Covid-19 was rampant and masks were mandatory.
Driving along, he’s pulled over by Indigenous Sheriff Butterfly Jiminez (William Belleau) for entering the Pueblo of Santa Lupe jurisdiction without a face mask.
Then he’s chided by Eddington’s popular Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is running for re-election. But supposedly civic-minded Ted has an insidious agenda: he’s backing a huge A.I. data center that’s being built nearby. Obviously, what it foreshadows will hasten humanity’s decline.
So Joe decides not only to oppose Ted’s re-election but also to run against Ted as an anti-lockdown candidate. That infuriates his already aggrieved, emotionally unstable wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who was the victim of sexual abuse when she was 16 and subsequently forced to have an abortion.
Adding to Louise’s angst, her mother Dawn (Deidre O’Connor) spews ludicrous QAnon conspiracy theories, plus there’s this seductive Christian cult leader, Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who claims that, years ago, he was sold into a pedophile sex trafficking ring.
Meanwhile, racial unrest is rampant. George Floyd’s murder by a white Minneapolis cop incites anti-police, Black Lives Matter teen protesters like Sarah (Amelie Hoeferle), Brian (Cameron Mann), and the mayor’s son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka).
Hovering on the sidelines is Joe’s Black deputy Mikey (Michael Ward), the hapless recipient of white abuse, even from fellow deputy Guy (Luke Grimes).
All of this propels sociopathic Joe into a rampage of murderous violence — after which Ari Aster heaps on one humiliation after another, including showing Joe dragged, full-frontal naked onto a toilet by an ‘aide’ who subsequently crawls into bed alongside him and Louise.
After “Hereditary,” “Midsommar” and “Beau is Afraid,” I expected better from writer-director Ari Aster.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Eddington” is a self-indulgent, tedious 3, playing in theaters.
Susan Granger is a product of Hollywood. Her natural father, S. Sylvan Simon, was a director and producer at M.G.M. and Columbia Pictures. Her adoptive father, Armand Deutsch, produced movies at M.G.M.
As a child, Susan appeared in movies with Abbott & Costello, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, Margaret O’Brien, and Lassie. She attended Mills College in California, studying journalism with Pierre Salinger, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism.