Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal take on Trump’s Wild West

What we see in Eddington, the new film by American director Ari Aster, is grotesque and absurd, but unfortunately, this distorting mirror of contemporary America accurately reflects a reality that was unimaginable not so long ago, which today defies reason. Aster packs all of this into the four streets of a small town in New Mexico called Eddington, whose sheriff — played by a brilliant Joaquin Phoenix — faces off against the Hispanic mayor, played by Pedro Pascal. The duel between the two is an important aspect, but the main objective of the film (and its crazy and violent plot) is to capture the grotesque present of a country that re-elected Donald Trump as its president.

Eddington takes place during the pandemic; specifically, at the end of May 2020, exactly five years ago. At the time, a Minneapolis police officer had suffocated African American George Floyd to death, a murder that sparked Black Lives Matter street protests across the United States. Phoenix is the white sheriff of a tiny desert town; he refuses to wear a face mask and even encourages his fellow citizens not to. Few films — perhaps Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn — have managed to satirize the use of face masks in such a biting way, which here are only a drop in the conspiratorial well that was the pandemic and which in Eddington swallows the sheriff’s mother-in-law while his wife (Emma Stone) dedicates herself to embroidering dolls, consumed by the pedophile theories of the far-right movement QAnon. There is also another character, played by Austin Butler, who seems like a parody of some of the enlightened ones who ended up storming the Capitol.

Pascal is Hispanic and not only the mayor, but also the owner of the town bar. He turns out to be a much more level-headed man than the sheriff, but Aster leaves no stone unturned, and that includes the local youth and their Black Lives Matter protests.

With grace and malice, the director of Midsommar (2019) and Hereditary (2018) turns Eddington (shot in Albuquerque) into a stage set on which all the elements of American society are represented (from scared and paranoid whites to Native Americans, African Americans and Hispanics). All are part of a new Wild West, fertile ground for Trumpism and the cult of alternative internet truths.

Aster skillfully introduces the language of social media and television, that amalgam in which no one can distinguish between news and lies anymore. In the background, for example, on a television, journalist and far-right personality Tucker Carlson appears. If last week at Cannes a messianic Tom Cruise’s last impossible mission was to safeguard the truth, on Friday it was another film from the opposite pole that reminded us how the chaos that lurks before us is brewing.

Aster’s political satire moves away from the psychological horror and dark explorations of trauma in his previous films. After Beau is Afraid (2023), which delved into the dark psyche of its protagonist, the filmmaker again casts Phoenix, who manages to create a very funny character who has multiple experiences (his wife leaves him, he gets infected with Covid...) while he parades his old-school white supremacy (no to masks, yes to taking up arms) through the four streets of a town devoted to new forms of Satanism.

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