I got a chance to see Eddington a few days before its general cinematic release and the trailer seemed intriguing and it has some big names and I thought it was worth a try as I was disappointed with Beau is Afraid and Hereditary and Midsommar were slightly odd films. The film is set in May 2020 when the world was preoccupied with the coronavirus and the Sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) is trying to stop people wearing masks but the Mayor (Pedro Pascal) is the opposite and the film then seems to try and make it the Sheriff vs the Mayor before becoming about the chaos caused by Black Lives Matter.
This is the third Pedro Pascal film that I have seen in the space of a few weeks and whilst he doesn't feature as much as he did in The Fantastic Four: First Steps or Materialists but he is quite good in this and is the opposite of Joaquin Phoenix’s Sheriff in every way imaginable and that is one of the key things about the film. I do think as much as I think that Joaquin Phoenix is a very good actor, there is something about him that seems odd to me. It’s this oddness that makes the Sheriff come across as a nice person. Emma Stone is sort of in the film but it feels like all her stuff was filmed in a couple of days because she seems to spend 80% of her time in bed and then after the Sheriff says that the Mayor raped her, she gets up and leaves and that is it until a brief appearance at the end.
The whole BLM protests sort of deal with the idea of white privilege but it's said through people who feel like they have to be offended on other people's behalf. They are very pretentious and unfortunately seem like they have been cut and pasted from real life.
At two and a half hours the film surprisingly didn’t outstay its welcome. The film has enough going to make the time go by. Despite that though the film doesn't really have much in the way of action moments. There are moments of interest which did make me feel engaged with the story but it wasn't until the final 20 minutes to be quite good because it was the most action that the entire film sees and it was quite good how we got to see the passive Sheriff go full Rambo. The film does feel like it goes a bit like an Ari Aster when the Sheriff gets stabbed in the head and becomes a vegetable but is paraded about by his mother in law who in the last shot of the film shares a bed along with the male nurse. I got the feeling that Aster put this in as the film has been relatively straightforward until that point.
I enjoyed Eddington. Beau is Afraid was fairly terrible and this was a massive step up. I think setting the film in 2020 allows the film to deal with something that is in recent history but far enough that feels like it is trying to capitalise. Compared to what Aster has done in the past, this is his more accessible movie but I still think it might be a tough sell for a lot of cinema goers because it doesn't really have an exposition scene where someone comes on screen and explains what is going on and caused all this. I suppose as this was using a lot of real life events it's implied that mis-information is the real enabler and the reason why people and things get out of hand. Eddington is worth your time although it does depend on how comfortable you are going back to that really dark period in our recent history.