When I first heard about Eddington, I wasn’t sure what to think. In fact, after reading into Ari Aster’s thriller about a town becoming a powder keg at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I didn’t know if I was ready to revisit one of the most turbulent times of my entire life, and so I skipped it when it first arrived on the 2025 movie schedule. Well, I recently changed that, and my initial hesitation was warranted.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked the new A24 movie more than a lot of people (though not as much as some). I thought Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal were extraordinary as Sheriff Joe Cross and Mayor Ted Garcia, respectively, as rivals butting heads and taking shots at one another. However, there’s something that’s been bothering me since I watched Eddington about a week ago…
I Put Off Watching Eddington Because My 2020 Wounds Were Still Fresh
Though the initial outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is already nearing its sixth anniversary, my wounds from a very rocky 2020 are still quite fresh. From the disease itself, killing approximately seven million people, per the World Health Organization, to the political turmoil of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, to the civil unrest that followed the death of George Floyd, it’s safe to say that many of us are still processing everything that went down.
Watching documentaries about the pandemic never really seems to get me too bogged down, but for some reason, this drama set in that era was something that seemed too much for me. And after watching Eddington after all these months, I still don’t think I’m ready to revisit that trauma. Honestly, I don’t know if I ever will.
This Movie Feels Like It Was Written To Piss Me Off, And I Can’t Really Vibe With That
While watching Eddington, I kept thinking that Ari Aster wasn’t just trying to make me remember everything that happened in 2020 (he stuffs it all into the two-and-a-half-hour runtime), but also actively trying to enrage his audience. It felt like he didn’t want us to settle for recounting traumatic experiences. Instead, the movie’s story is presented in a way that it festers, mutates, and turns into this snowball of rage that finally explodes, leaving no one unscathed.
Though I appreciate Aster’s eye, his messed-up sense of humor, and ability to craft thought-provoking narratives that don’t let go, I didn’t really vibe with what was going down in Eddington, New Mexico.
It Appears This Was Ari Aster’s Point All Along
Ahead of Eddington’s release over the summer, my colleague, Eric Eisenberg, sat down with Ari Aster to discuss the divisive nature of the movie and what the director thought about the audience’s reactions to the story. In the following quote, the filmmaker pretty much answered the question I’ve had since watching: Was this made to piss us off?
Well, I try to not get caught up and worry about how something’s gonna like land while I’m writing. I try to just not restrain anything. And then once it’s on paper, it’s kind of a matter of keeping my nerve and maybe being smart enough to know what maybe should be plucked. I don’t know. But we knew it was gonna be divisive. It’s about polarization; it’s about division. And we tried to pull back as far as we could to have it be about the environment, where kind of everybody is kind of in one way or another missing part of the picture.
The whole “it’s about polarization” argument, though hard to take, does help me make sense of what Aster was trying to say, or at least prove, with Eddington. I still have my issues with the movie, but that’s the beauty of art.
Eddington, like several other new and recent movies streaming, is available with an HBO Max subscription. Why not get the whole family together and watch this Thanksgiving? Well, maybe not…