What just happened?: "Eddington"

The troll Ari Aster expands anew. 2023's Beau is Afraid, the first of this director's needling, wildly self-indulgent films to generate gags I halfway enjoyed, charted the spiralling madness of one man's life. (If it felt unusually close to home at various points, that's because it appeared to be dramatising the filmmaker's own life.) His latest Eddington charts the spiralling madness of an entire town or country, using the titular New Mexico outpost as a stand-in for America - and perhaps any public space or square - at the moment of Covid. It opens by following a parched itinerant muttering darkly on his way to being a public nuisance, then pulls back to dramatise how it was that we filled our newly spare time and empty streets. It's far from a pretty picture; two hours and twenty minutes later, that initial drifter, bound for a sorry fate, will come off as one of the film's more moderate loons, and you the viewer will likely give thanks that you got through the last five years intact. So what just happened? In Aster's eyes, the entire world succumbed to exactly that suspicion and uptightness that he diagnosed as festering within himself in Beau, plus an extra-nutty top layer of conspiratorial thinking, accentuated by the fact we found ourselves under near-permanent surveillance on Zoom and Instagram, and by our fellow man. Who's in control here? A sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) who persistently refuses to wear a mask, not out of any real commitment to the culture-war cause, more that - as with his day job - he can't really be arsed. And a liberal mayor (Pedro Pascal) whose efforts to do and say the right thing are undermined by a sex scandal; his big progressive policy idea is to build a data centre to suck up the region's resources. This was, in Aster's view, a time when even those who weren't conspiratorially minded were given cause to wonder what the hell our leaders, and many of our fellow citizens, were playing at.

Aster is broadly correct in his diagnosis that this was a period that drove us all mad to some degree, but Eddington, while less mannered than its immediate predecessor, remains a very odd, sometimes outright confounding film. Much as Covid knocked the world off its axis for two years, this restless, unsettled feature appears to have no centre whatsoever; it's once again, for better and worse, producers A24 encouraging one of their pet creatives to turn in whatever they've got, no questions asked. Somewhere in here is an amusing 90-minute romp about the enmity between two public figureheads, though even this squabble proves altogether one-sided: Phoenix, nimbly etching a blustering, amusingly intransigent sitcom villain, acts the much-touted Pascal off the screen. There's really only one character worth following, a liability in a state-of-the-nation ensemble piece, and the further Eddington ventures beyond this central antagonism, the sketchier its portraiture gets. There are too many characters on the sidelines with nothing much to do, jokes that don't develop and don't go anywhere: the Sheriff's unhappy, unhealthy wife (Emma Stone), who's known both candidates in the Biblical sense and suffered for it; the Mayor's son (Matt Gomez Hidaka), brushing up on the Black Lives Matter movement so as to get into a classmate's pants; an online cult leader (Austin Butler) who represents all those grifter-predators afforded undue prominence as the world shifted to the virtual space; and a clutch of shadowy, ill-defined figures chuntering at various volumes.

We start to get some sense of place and community whenever Aster turns off his main narrative drag; the trouble is very few of the avenues and alleyways he pulls into are anything like as compelling as the central Phoenix-Pascal contretemps. It's the same problem as could be detected in Celine Song's Materialists: a semi-promising creative talent gets hyped to the heavens by critics as a vital new voice in American cinema, and all of a sudden their producers start waving even their most wayward and half-formed ideas through. (Never mind A24 needing a more rigorous script editor; Eddington would indicate they're in dire need of editors full-stop.) Here, though, the biggest issues really are those of direction. Beau is Afraid had its ups and downs, too, but that film kept alighting on new and fertile territory, even if this was just composed of neuroses and complexes Aster knew like the back of his own hand. Eddington is fine when it's going for laughs, but it stalls whenever its creative prime mover strives to go the extra mile and fashion those laughs into a definitive misanthropic statement about his fellow Americans. Time and again, a scene that heads in a usefully funny direction is followed by one that takes a wrong turn into a cul-de-sac of guff: the laughs evaporate on your lips while Aster stands there rolling his eyes and tutting "people, huh". Through to an entirely cuttable coda that exists solely to humiliate one of the film's survivors and adds nothing but bemusement (why are we still here? Why can't we go home yet?), this filmmaker cannot help himself, and no-one who could and should is intervening. There's still much to be said about the sorry state of American social discourse - but it really requires a film that doesn't also suggest American showbusiness has lost its own marbles and bearings at the exact same moment.

Eddington opens in selected cinemas from today.