The Waste of Talent in Eddington should be avoided

Eddington – 2025

Written and Directed by Ari Aster
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, Emma Stone

Eddington finds Ari Aster trying to make every statement possible about the state of the world during covid. The end result is one of the most confused films I have paid money for in decades. If ever there was a director screaming for an editor, this is it.

Aster had a magnificent first two films with Hereditary and both versions of Midsommar. Since then, we’ve seen the weird but somewhat fascinating anomaly Beau is Afraid. And now this.

In May 2020, in Eddington, New Mexico, we find small-town Sheriff Joe Cross. He is an even smaller thinker. Sheriff Cross is up against a mayor. The mayor is backed by COVID restrictions and big business.

There are about 10 other story lines to go with this one. They are exceptionally pointless, when one compares them to even the worst of Robert Altman’s films.

One of the biggest challenges in this film is the exceptional misuse of the leads. Phoenix has never been more annoying to watch. It feels like he just told Aster “I got this” after reading the outline of a script. Then he just method acted his way to hell. One can imagine how much Robert Duvall could have achieved with the same script. This highlights the amount of waste.

If you’re looking for the one property outside of The Mandalorian that doesn’t kill off Pedro Pascal, keep looking. Pascal is a great actor, but he needs to find a different agent. Here’s hoping next week’s Fantastic Four reboot allows him to live through the runtime. This viewer is not holding his breath.

The rest of the cast feels wasted. There are Oscar winners, nominees and great character actors. They all should go nameless for their performance and their inability to walk away from underdeveloped, hell, bad, material.

There are stories worth telling out there regarding the world’s most recent pandemic. This is not one of them.
(* out of *****)