Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal sink into the madness of the Covid era in Eddington

Who would ever want to relive the first months of the pandemic, difficult and frightening, where the quarrels on masks and Lockdown mixed with national protests against police brutality? This is the set of the fiery war in which the director Ari Aster It makes us get back in his new film, Eddingtonan unpleasant and discontinuous satire presented in preview al Cannes Film Festival May 16.

The film begins strangely quietly, wandering around a small town in New Mexico in May 2020 while it presents us with a cast of scruffy characters who are mostly trying to take forward. I say “strangely” because in its three previous films (Hereditier, Midsommar And Beau is afraid) Aster started with a bang. Here, however, it makes us calmly enter, almost at the limit of boredom. There is some jokes that ironically on the rules and neuroses of that period (the quarrels for the masks where there are still no contagions; the apparently harmless but potentially dangerous banality of which social media bombed us from the screens of the phones), but none is truly memorable.

When the local sheriff, Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), he decides to apply against the subtle mayor of the city, Ted (Pedro Pascal), it almost seems that Aster is venturing into an allegory of the 2020 presidential elections (or, more generally, of US bipartisons). Joe tries to deploy his crazy in favor of his anti-mastirine cause, while Ted tries to conclude great business with the aim of a future in Washington. On the one hand, there are the crazyly online crazy ones; on the other, the technocrats obsessed with money. US electoral policy is a more than legitimate target, but it is not easy to hit it precisely.

Aster also attacks the young paladins of social justice, children largely white that the film constantly makes fun of the aggressive tone they adopt and the theatrical performance of the racial guilt. Young people of this type can actually be irritating, given the frustrating speed with which they are ready to judge or condemn, as well as awkwardly concentrated on themselves. But the film criticizes them as much (if not more) severely than anyone who is on the other side, as conspiracy theorists and anti-science fanatics, whose ideas and actions represent a much more immediate threat for others. Aster did not have to make a blatantly pro-progressive film, but but Eddington Sometimes it comes really close to equating Trumpism and left, a common rhetorical tactic used by some of the worst commentators of this country. It is a false equivalence that led straight to the chaos in which we currently find ourselves, and that pushes me to ask me if and as ASTER could have changed its approach if it had shot the film after the last presidential elections.

Maybe nothing would have changed. Eddington It gradually moves away from the themes closely linked to current affairs to offer a desperate and cupically fun reflection on a America inclined to thoughts and acts of violence, entrenched in a growing conflict, trapped in a terrible entropy. When Aster finally gives us inside and intensifies the action, Eddington He takes a strange fold. They were made with It is not a country for old peoplebut the film is not even remotely dark and deep like that chilling masterpiece. Eddington It is rather a grotesque comedy on moral decline, a film on a villain that takes advantage of the whole conflict that surrounds him (and that he himself helped to create) to deal with the desires and grudges that consume him.

Even if in Eddington There is certainly Trumpismo, I don’t think it’s really a film about Trump. It is mostly one Crime Story enriched with political symbols. A better film would have intertwined the big themes with individual events, but Aster prefers to leave the two separate and dissonant elements, next to each other, to clash in the desert wind. The whistles that I heard at the end of the press projection did not seem to disagree, but of dissatisfaction. Despite the promising setting, Eddington It turns out above all chaotic and confused.

On the other hand, it seems quite appropriate, given that the United States struggles to redefine (or reinvent) their purpose. Phoenix, who in Beau is afraid He played an anxious alter ego of Aster, he gets away very well with this type of squalid humor, and he is very good in the role of a fool’s bankruptcy, complete with dry cough from Covid. Joe, the character of Phoenix, is unpleasant to look at, and this is precisely the point. Pascal, for its part, merely shows a slight grease, while a Emma Stone (who plays Joe’s stunned wife) A sincerely sad secondary subtrama is given which, however, clashes with the general mischievousness of the film.

Honor to Aster, however, for offering a role to the great ladies of the New York theater. If Beau is afraid made a fantastic use of Patti Lupone, Eddington expertly uses great Deirdre O’Connell In the role of Joe’s Aceillary Suocera, Dawn, a fanatic of conspiracy theories that continually pushes his daughter to “do his own research” about crazy and absurd theories on mysterious cricche that perform evil actions (the mysterious cricches are certainly not lacking in this poor country, only that they are not those in which people like Dawn believes). O’Connell makes the tone and character of such a person perfectly, giving the impression of a hippie who has become the victim of a freedom delirium. Here the film is acute and tragically fun, unlike the increasingly tired and exasperated gags on the allies of Black Lives Matter and indigenous policies.

Aster has the right to express his pessimism and to target all indiscriminately. But perhaps his brush is too wide, and sacrifices the nuances in favor of cynical conclusions to the Bill Maheraccording to which they all have wrong and are all stupid to worry. Given the humanism that pervades Aster’s work, I don’t think this is actually his vision of the world. Eddingtonhowever, it touches paranoia, since it is a film that derives its anger from exasperation. It is sadly significant that the best parts of the film are those in which it turns into a furious anarchist shooting. Perhaps it is there that the terminal end of America is found: guns that shoot tirelessly in a now perennial night.