Eddington’s review | Film club

In physics, quoting Treccani, the Eddington luminosity is the “upper limit to the luminosity that can be emitted by a spherical body in hydrostatic equilibrium, for example a star, above which the pressure that the radiation exerts on matter prevails over the force of gravity, making the body unstable”.

In the new river film by Ari Aster, Eddington it is instead a town in the New Mexico desert which, in terms of risks of instability, has nothing to envy of the celestial bodies. The film begins with a tramp calling for divine punishment on Eddington, cursing the place while mumbling a disjointed mantra, in the style of King’s Trashcan Man The shadow of the scorpion.

We are in May 2020, in the midst of Covid: in the middle of the night, on the edge of the city, Sheriff Joe Cross is driving, crippled and asthmatic, resistant to the rules imposed by the pandemic. A patrol from the neighboring county stops him and orders him to wear a mask with increasingly authoritarian methods. Cross first refuses, then gives in. We sense right now that that man hides an anger that sooner or later is destined to explode. Meanwhile, elections for the mayor are being prepared in Eddington: the outgoing mayor, the Hispanic Ted Garcia, anxious for reconfirmation, is betting everything on the construction of a new high-tech center which, however, risks absorbing the town’s energy and water, arousing discontent even within the city council. A series of apparently harmless clashes over the limitations due to the lockdown raise the tension, until, in a fit of self-affirmation, the sheriff decides to challenge the mayor in the upcoming elections.

In this climate of increasingly bitter rivalry, echoes of clashes between police forces and protesters appear on the horizon Black Lives Matter erupted after the death – murder – of George Floyd. The “poor” sheriff Cross, concentrated on his unlikely electoral campaign assisted by his only two police officers – a blond with dormant racist tendencies and a black who became a policeman due to family tradition – is forced to face emergencies (Covid and street demonstrations) which in his proudly provincial mind are not an Eddington problem, they remain factors far from the dusty streets of that corner of the world.

Aster in the first part of the film he constructs a contemporary western with veins of Thomas Pynchon which tells of an ostentatiously marginal America; he uses satire and the grotesque to tell the story of the irruption of larger, even global, instances in an otherwise closed microcosm like a monad. Even the description of the ridiculous political dichotomy traces the polarization between an integrated America, superficially liberal but subservient to the interests of capital and the vulgar and family-oriented populism which in the name of freedom invents lies to hide the inability to analyze any socio-cultural problem.

Joaquin Phoenix (the sheriff) e Pedro Pascal (the mayor) are two-dimensional figurines of an America that is increasingly smaller and meaner, in spite of Making America Great Again. Aster however, as already demonstrated in his previous films, has no sense of limits. The increasingly intense clash between those two dwarfs who think of themselves as giants – more similar to a quarrel between terrible neighbors than to an institutional challenge – brings together suggestions without interruption: conspiracy theories, fake newsracial clashes, cryptocurrencies, technological giants, real or alleged rapes and abuses, TV neoguru, abuse of weapons, anti-vax tendencies. And while the television broadcasts the riots live that inflame various American metropolises, that crazy world also enters into sleepy Eddington, generating a crazy short circuit of death and violence. It is in this senseless bullish game – Aster he seems like a serial accumulator of themes that he barely controls – which Eddington (the film, not the city) ends up imploding on itself.

The contradictions of American society, which hide festering sores, are trivialized, simplified, reduced to a joke. The crude taste of violence overwhelms every satirical ambition to the point of emptying it. The hysteria of the characters is complacent and Aster’s gaze is neither detached enough to give depth to the grotesque representation of that world nor empathetic enough to give body and soul to the characters. What remains is an endless sequence of scenes in paroxysmal crescendo that seems to amuse its author more than the audience. Eddington is a narcissistic, bulimic, redundant film: much, indeed too much, ado about nothing.