A data centre costs roughly half a billion dollars to build. The proposal includes water consumption and electrical power usage and tax benefits which serve as incentives to attract investors. In Ari Aster's Eddington, a tech company wants to plant one in a fictional New Mexico town of 2,435 residents, and the mayor supports it while the sheriff opposes it. You'd think this would be the film's organising tension.
It isn't. Aster uses the data centre as background decoration in his work. His true interests become evident through this statement.
The film is set during the early months of COVID-19, when masking was still a live argument and the George Floyd protests were spreading from Minneapolis outward.
Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) is the sheriff, a man whose asthma makes masks particularly uncomfortable and whose wife Louise (Emma Stone) once dated the current mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), when she was sixteen. Maybe dated. Maybe more. The unclear situation causes Joe such deep suffering which the movie shows as a private loss instead of a matter for legal interpretation.
Phoenix performs all the tasks which are available to him. The character of Joe in this scene displays a combination of physical slouching and mental confusion because he wants to avoid historical events but they continuously appear in his life. Phoenix shows his desperation through the campaign video recording which he does from his patrol car while he rants about masks. The man seeks to engage in a battle which he believes he will emerge victorious from.
The film presents its characters with an unorthodox display of backing throughout the story. Dawn the mother-in-law of Joe (Deirdre O'Connell) watches QAnon conspiracy videos while a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler in an underwhelming performance) enters the scene to share his beliefs about powerful child abusers. These are treated as symptoms of isolation, loneliness, the internet's effects on people with too much time.
The Black Lives Matter protests which teenagers in town began to organize made Aster view their political activism as a hormonal display between two white boys who fought for the attention of a girl who studied Angela Davis.
The group members make a joke about Sarah and her friends who they call "Blond bitches named Sarah think they're Rosa Parks."The film seems to agree.
The only Black character who receives meaningful screen time in the movie is Deputy Michael (Micheal Ward). Sarah meets Michael at a protest where she demands him to leave his position and join their cause. "You should be with us," she says. The performance shows an innocent appearance which uses childlike theatricality to create a fake display of genuine belief. Meanwhile Joe's confusion about racial grievance gets the benefit of Phoenix's wounded sincerity.
I kept thinking about who gets to be complicated here and who doesn't.
The technical craft is lovely. The New Mexico desert appears Martian-like through Darius Khondji's camera work which shows vast burnt orange landscapes that make all human conflicts seem insignificant. The film demonstrates Aster's capabilities through an extended scene which shows Joe arriving at a campaign party while the camera follows him through masked guests until Ted strikes him twice in the face during Katy Perry's "Firework" performance. It's humiliating and precise.
Aster displays his typical head-trauma enthusiasm when violence makes its appearance. The Native American sheriff creates additional jurisdictional problems which fail to enhance the story. The tech company conspiracy develops through events which seem like they were required to happen.
The presentation of false equivalence as deep understanding created a problem for me because it gave equal attention to both sides. Liberals are hypocrites; conservatives are paranoid; everyone is venal; social media ruined everything. The movie presents a view which matches what your uncle might say during Christmas when he claims all politicians engage in dishonest activities. Aster supposedly created the script during a previous time period before Hereditary emerged and he adapted it to match the pandemic setting. The seams show.
Louise, for her part, gets little to do except be the object of male fixation. Stone's abilities become reduced to a character who exists because of his past suffering which makes his wife's background the main focus of the story. The third act of the film eliminates the data centre debate which should have used to establish order in the story through concrete elements. Who benefits?Who loses their land?
Instead we get spectacle. Mounting absurdity. The story concludes by shifting into black comedic elements which fail to achieve their intended effect.
Eddington will find defenders. It's too messy and provocative not to. But provocation without perspective is just noise, and at two and a half hours, this is a lot of noise for a film that ultimately shrugs at everything it depicts.
