https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/law-and-order
22 August 2025 Culture

Ari Aster, who gave the horror film a new jolt of macabre energy in Hereditary (2017) and Midsommar (2019), both concerned in part with the nightmare – or jet-black comedy – of being a daughter, has recently taken a turn towards psychological melodrama, with male folly and fear of impotence as its central theme. Like the divisive Beau Is Afraid (2023), which resembled a three-hour panic attack, Eddington stars Joaquin Phoenix looking less than his best and portrays a sort of heightened mid-life crisis. The shift seems merely contingent, a product of industry mechanics. Aster, who was born in 1986, has explained that he had originally intended Beau Is Afraid to be his debut, a statement as eccentric and disturbing as anything in the film itself. Eddington reworks and – crucially – updates another script, a neo-Western, which was languishing in his drawer when Hereditary, the story of a family curse replete with jump-scares, opened at Sundance and turned him almost overnight into the most extensively discussed and closely followed American filmmaker of his generation.

The setting is a small town (pop. 2,435) in New Mexico during the early days of COVID-19. One morning the sheriff Joe Ross (Joaquin Phoenix) is called to the supermarket, where an old man is refusing to comply with lockdown protocol. Joe himself is asthmatic and doesn’t believe that mask-wearing should be enforced without exception. Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), Eddington’s mayor, is among the other shoppers, and the two men debate whether state-wide measures are ‘enforceable’ in the town. Joe believes that this difference of interpretation is reflective of incompatible codes of conduct, and he decides to run against Ted in the forthcoming election. If only he was in charge, his thinking goes, he could restore a sense of common decency, one mask-exemption at a time. He turns the sheriff’s office into his campaign headquarters, his patrol car into a mobile loudhailer and poster display, though the streets are deserted. His wife Lou (Emma Stone) is not impressed that he uploaded the selfie video announcing his candidacy before discussing the plan with her. Before long, she’s fallen under the sway of a charismatic cult leader (Austin Butler), who seduces potential adherents with tales of an underground paedophile cult.

There’s a boldness to the basic coordinates. The sympathetic underdog figure, initially the sole occupant of the film’s point of view, is a white man with conspiracist leanings, a law-and-order ethos, and a libertarian streak, while the villain is a second-generation immigrant, socially liberal and a single parent. It’s the Native American policeman from the neighbouring town who most succinctly manifests the problem Aster is anatomising. ‘I am listening,’ he tells Joe, before adding: ‘Shut up!’ Joe may appear justified in thinking that a wheezing geriatric or an asthma sufferer should be exempt from the rules about wearing face masks, especially in a place where nobody has been diagnosed with COVID. But Joe’s insistence on flexibility or compassion has its limits. He fails to recognise, for example, that his mother-in-law is unable to stick to the agreed April deadline for vacating the spare bedroom because, as his wife explains, the pandemic isn’t over.

But Aster isn’t content to play around with these paradoxes, or instigate a see-saw motion whereby Joe and Ted take turns appearing sensible or in the right. Little happens as a result of the county’s lockdown protocol or even the mayoral contest. Not long after Joe announces his candidacy, we cut to Ted in conversation outside his home (the subject is the construction of a much-debated data facility). The scene seems to indicate Aster’s desire to do for Ted what the opening twenty minutes have done for Joe, revealing the inner life of a stereotype, or just providing a glimpse behind the scenes of his campaign. But then, not for the last time, there’s a sudden change of direction, a widening of scope, and an expansion of ambitions (with repercussions for the film’s running time). Almost every time we expect a mirror image, or the reverse angle, of what we have just been shown, Aster shows us something new.

This is one of the things that gives Eddington such a keen advantage over the recent – and more prominent – character-led films directed by Aster’s contemporaries. Celine Song, in the romantic drama Materialists, establishes a dichotomy between security and passion, then picks a side; in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, a horror thriller which he has described as a cross between Hereditary and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, the switches of perspective and genre are entirely at the service of a muddy, meaningless plot. Those films embody the dangers of having too much of a theme and a scheme, and of having too little. Eddington charts the middle course, a qualified liberty, freedom within a framework.

It turns out that the scene at the mayoral ranch is there to introduce Ted’s teenage son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), though Eric is himself largely a conduit to his friend Brian (Cameron Mann), who is trying to earn the affections – from a six-metre distance – of the social-justice activist Sarah (Amélie Hoerferle). Though reliable dating gossip is hard to come by in a town where no-one can agree on anything, it appears that Sarah was recently involved with Joe’s colleague Michael (Micheal Ward) but she ended things around the time of the killing of George Floyd because Michael works in law enforcement, which is more important to her than – and is actually exacerbated by – the fact that he is black. Brian tries to start a conversation with Sarah about the Angela Davis book she is brandishing, but his Lenin Peace Prize reference draws a blank look. He then provokes scorn by insinuating that ‘privilege’ might denote more than one thing. Eric wonders if he has dropped his ‘red cap’ somewhere. Brian’s reaction is not to repeat the point but to go all in as a justice warrior, participating in Sarah’s protests for Black Lives Matter and Pueblo land rights, and even trying to introduce his parents to critical race theory.

The film is not without broad touches, but they don’t embody broad ideas. Brian is certainly a source of ridicule. His father responds to his little lecture by demanding, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ and pointing out that Brian himself is white. But while we may laugh at his intervention, we are hardly on his side, not least because the family dinner is being served in front of a heaving armoury and because he also asks Brian whether he is ‘fucking retarded’. On the whole, the film’s dialogue is inclined towards questions of a more searching variety: ‘How did we get here?’, ‘Is it worth it?’, ‘How can I help you understand?’ Aster is clearly pained at the lack of consensus, not the loss of a political centre ground, but more essential – or basic – sites of agreement. But he also knows that some questions are not worth asking, or are less thoughtful than they appear, less rhetorical than the questioner intends. The film makes it clear that Joe is not, as he is desperate to believe, the last bastion of sanity, but when his crankish mother-in-law asks, in relation to her husband’s cardiac arrest, ‘Who knows if he could actually have made it?’ he is the one who gives the firm reply, ‘I do.’

Eddington has things in common with Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing (1989) – that phrase is used – in which a conflict of perspectives in a tight-knight community boils over into violence, Falling Down (1993), Joel Schumacher’s thriller about a middle-aged man stressed-out to the point of murderous vigilantism, and The Simpsons Movie (2007), which traces the fallout after the people of Springfield are forced to live under a glass dome. But the closest precedent for the way things unfold is the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, both of whom are thanked in the end credits. Joe Ross is a confounding meld of Coen Brothers types. His sense of being out of step or out of his depth, recalls Ed in No Country for Old Men, a sheriff in – neighbouring – west Texas, and the Minnesotan physics teacher in A Serious Man, who feels that reality is conspiring against him, except that Joe’s response is to fight back. At first he resembles Marge, the local policewoman in Fargo – a debt perhaps reflected in Aster’s town-name title – and even the Dude in The Big Lebowski, sleepy and grunting, but he quickly mutates into Walter Sobchak, the Dude’s pal, who pulls out a pistol and asks, ‘Has the whole world gone crazy?’ though the grievance in that case is the disregard of rules – crossing the foul line in a game of ten-pin bowling – not their arbitrary imposition.

But while Eddington shares those films’ reluctance to reconcile competing visions of reality, or display a preference, its exit route is closer to despair than shrugging nihilism, less diminuendo than deus ex machina and reductio ad absurdum – not life going on in its pointless, baffling way but going to hell in a handcart. And whereas the Coen Brothers retreat from polemic, using their occasional freighted backdrops – the Gulf War in The Big Lebowski, Washington DC in Burn after Reading – as a source of abstract concepts or allusive gags, Aster is genuinely engaged with America in the age of Twitter and Trump.

Eddington represents a breakthrough – the first time that Aster has seemed in control as both a writer and director. Though the film makes a number of startling moves, it exhibits none of the anything-goes logic or silliness of tone – the product by turns of outsize comic devices and a lack of irony – that to different degrees encumbered all of his previous work. The rhythm here is gentler, the rhetorical pitch cooler. Shot by the Iranian-French director of photography, Darius Khondji, it is full of sleek movement and pleasing compositions, despite the ubiquity of iPhones and logos and slogans, with ingenious use of artificial light, as both eyesore and symbol, almost from the first shot until the last. The actors draw sparingly on their capacity for intense emotional effects, in particular Emma Stone, who more or less only uses her eyes. It’s as if the sensationalism of the subject matter alerted Aster to the virtues of patience and modulation, by way of rebuke. This time he really earns our gasps.