When thinking about a Western, the usual thought involves a big star name, such as the iconic John Wayne, riding on horseback and gunslinging around the outlandish American West.
Instead of following this stereotype, Ari Aster, the writer and director of “Eddington,” subverts expectations surrounding the traditional concept by telling a Western story through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic and small-town politics…at least for the first act.
The film follows Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) deciding to run against Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) at midterms in the midst of the chaos that was 2020, including a wide variety of topics from the Black Lives Matter protests to social media influence to conspiracy theories infecting politics.
Phoenix is the standout of the film as he brings in Southwestern dialect to his performance that doesn’t really appear with Pascal’s performance.
Speaking of, Pascal and the other actors in the film don’t really have any dialect or standout qualities as their acting isn’t to standout or assume a role but rather to portray an everyday, normal person.
The cinematography of the film helps aid this conflicted plot by utilizing unique camera angles and framing as well as keeping the camera almost always at eye level with characters to make the audience feel as if they were on the street next to the characters.
“Eddington’s” first act does a great job of highlighting what 2020 was really like. As I watched it, I thought that every history class should show their students this in the future to teach them about the reality of the pandemic.
This mostly continued into the second act, but things began to become more shifty.
There’s a subplot in the second act involving Cross’ wife Louise (Emma Stone), and an abuse survivor named Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) that felt randomly placed into the plot.
This subplot ends up making sense later in the second plot following along with the themes and main plot of the first act, but randomly switches up halfway through to become more of a murder investigation.
This was rather jarring, but was simple enough to follow as it was a clear path forward to the ending of the film.
So naturally, Aster made a sharp turn and started a completely different thing in the third act, which becomes a complete shootout between parties that don’t follow up on the murder investigation of the second act.
This becomes even more confusing as the third act starts to embrace horror elements that really shine through the cinematography and sound design, but get overshadowed by the incoherent plot.
Nothing in the first or second acts helps explain actions in the third act, so the entire time I’m left wondering what on Earth I just saw.
Nobody else in my showing had a clue either as everyone left with stunned and utterly confused facial expressions.
It also didn’t help that the third act on its own had a pacing problem where things just kept going and going with no real clear sense of direction or conclusion.
“Eddington” has a lot of strong commentary on how chaotic 2020 was in its first act in multiple aspects that would make for an incredible documentary on how the world was at the time, but begins to wobble in the second act before completely falling apart in the third act.
The actors aren’t anything too special, but they do a good job as the focus on a technical sense is more with the cinematography and sound design as the plot can’t decide which of three tones it wants to take.
“Eddington” could’ve been really good if it kept focused on the main plots of the first and second acts, but the third act devolves the film from being a modern Western into a mess.
Rating: 2.5/5
