The western is a historically iconic genre in the world of cinema. While some people say it’s old fashioned and outdated, westerns still give audiences interesting experiences that staunchly exist in the current culture like "Sicario" (2015), Hell or High Water (2016), and "Nomadland" (2020).
The new release "Eddington" is another such contemporary western starring Joaquin Phoenix ("Joker: Folie a Deux," 2024) and Pedro Pascal ("
The Fantastic Four: First Steps," 2025) as two community leaders on opposite sides of a New Mexico battlefield. In a small desert town, the county sheriff and the mayor argue over COVID protocols in the beginning months of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. This arguing pushes the working class sheriff to try running a mayoral campaign for himself and remove the more popular, and upper class, mayor from his position.
As we’ve seen in many past westerns, two, confident, hetero men find themselves as sworn enemies in a standoff of political identities. And, like we’ve seen online many times, this standoff turns violent. "Eddington" is one half a meditation on the stresses of the COVID quarantine and one half a gun-crazed hunt for a murderer. I divide this film into two halves literally, because it has two distinct moods and two different focal points. And dividing this film in two helps me better understand why I didn’t love it. The second half is exciting, compelling, and swift. But the first half moves so slowly, I kept thinking to myself, “Where is this even going?”
Because the first half is so boring and unclear, there’s no palpable sense of tension, intrigue, or danger. There’s actually no palpable sense of anything except annoyance in the first half. (The sheriff is annoyed by his wife falling under the spell of misinformation online, he’s annoyed with overzealous social justice protestors, and he’s annoyed with other things I can’t give away).
Joaquin Phoenix gives a realistically reserved leading performance as an ordinary man whose masculine authority is downsized so regularly, he turns into an incel/proud boy to retaliate. His tragic journey reminds all viewers how so many people felt during the COVID years: cornered and flummoxed. But I’m not sure viewers need reminding right now of how those years felt since they were less than a decade ago.
Director and screenwriter Ari Aster has made polarizing experimental films like "Hereditary" (2018) and "Midsommar" (2019) (both of which I have many problems with). And most recently before Eddington, Ari Aster gave us his biggest swing with the long odyssey of anxiety, "Beau is Afraid" (2023) which leans hardest into his strange art house creativity. "Eddington" doesn’t have much of that artsy creativity, so it might be the director’s most commercial film yet.
This film has some affecting, memorable moments in its second half. But overall it has too many ideas on manhood, politics, racism, internet deceptions, land use, and COVID shoved into its two hour and 28 minute run time. Lacking a tighter, stronger edit, "Eddington" tries to be a satire on the western genre and the social climate of COVID. But it’s so all over the place I couldn’t keep my interest alive. If you watch this film in the theater, its varying ideas will at least spark some dialogue with your friends. Maybe Ari Aster will be more successful sticking to his art house/abstract style instead of this.
