Eddington, and abject misery
Rhianne Ward
I came out of Eddington, and I felt terrible. My first mistake was seeing it alone. That's too much movie for one person to realistically carry. I desperately wanted to talk to anyone about the experience I'd just been through. I even felt the psychopathic desire to turn to random strangers I'd shared the theatre with mere moments prior, just to get this thing off my chest. Like I said, I felt terrible. The least anyone could do was split some terrible between us.
It really is a miserable film. Set during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Eddington follows the exploits of the town's sheriff, Joseph Cross, as he navigates a world that doesn't work for him. He's a nasty guy, and his nastiness escalates wildly from refusing to wear a mask in a supermarket, all the way to shooting at shadowy figures in the dark. His stubbornness – his unwillingness to yield in the face of change – leads to the loss of everything in his life he ever cared about, including his own personal autonomy. He almost feels positioned to be the hero of a more conventional tale, fighting back against “The Man” or whatever, but Joaquin Phoenix brings such a patheticness, such a biblical lack of charisma, that it is borderline impossible to root for him. Instead, the movie is about witnessing his own personal descent into hell, and the town that ends up caught in the crossfire (no pun intended).
Seems simple enough, right? Except that's not what the movie is about. At least, not completely. The title isn't Sheriff Cross. It's Eddington, the name of the town where it all takes place. As such, this is a story about a town in New Mexico, and the sheriff who resides there just happens to inhabit all of its worst qualities. The other characters, for the most part, are similarly unlikeable. Ted Garcia, the town mayor, is a career man through and through. His social politics seem good, and his vibe is generally clean, but he's pushing for this AI-powering data centre in the local area that seems destined to use up all the region’s water supply and tamper with the wildlife. He's better than Cross, for certain, but he can't wash off that politician stink.
His son is an annoying teenager who bandwagons onto the BLM social movement solely to try and get with a girl. His friend is doing the same thing to the same girl, but his aims branch out into a general desire for attention. The girl between these two dipshits is a political activist, whose choice of language leans quite far into hyper liberal sentiment more concerned with saying the right thing than actually meaning it, but she's only 18 and her heart is in the right place so it's difficult to actually hate her. She's one of maybe three semi-important characters who I generally liked.
There's two deputies who work for Cross. One is white, and an idiot, whose repeated use of the term “blacks” should raise some alarm bells for anyone who isn't exactly like him. The other is black, and it's clear that he only really chose this career path because it's what his dad used to do. He seems to consider Sheriff Cross as something of a fill-in father figure, although that's just me speculating. I can't say I ever really liked the guy, but by the end, I, at least, felt a little bad for what ended up happening to him. The next town over has cops as well, including Butterfly, who investigates the sheriff after REDACTED. He's cool; I was always rooting for that guy.
At home, there's Cross’s wife, Louise, and Dawn, her mother. Dawn is a crackpot constantly spouting COVID conspiracies to an audience of typically no-one. She's depicted as crazy, but ultimately reveals herself to be just a lonely old woman desperate to be heard. Louise is the same, albeit without the conspiracies, but in her quest to find someone who will actually hear her, she ends up wrapped up in the promises of a charismatic cult leader named Vernon. She rounds out the power trio of generally likeable characters who didn't do anything particularly wrong.
And then, finally, there's the homeless guy. He doesn't get a name, as far as I can tell, and the movie opens on a shot of him walking aimlessly down a desert road, muttering nonsense to himself. He's barely a person in the context of the movie. He's almost like a harbinger of death, but instead of bringing death, he's just got COVID. He's present during the first encounter between Mayor Garcia and Sheriff Cross, he shows up during the BLM protest later in the movie, and he appears one more time later in the film. He doesn't seem to believe anything, or hold any desires. He's not tied down to any social responsibilities. He doesn't seem to care about anyone around him. He simply moves between scenes like a smudge on the camera, always visible but easy to ignore once your brain adjusts, and yet, he might be the most important man in the movie.
There's an air of phoniness running through the veins of every character in Eddington. When they aren't lying to themselves or refusing to accept reality, like Cross, they’re using talking points to cover their own public image, like Garcia. Most of the BLM protestors are either decidedly there for the wrong reasons, or simply repeating liberal platitudes in the interest of appearing high-minded. Meanwhile, the rest of the townsfolk often give into their worst instincts, occasionally dropping slurs or falling back on bigoted positions. Everyone is fake or too stupid to be fake. The homeless guy, on the other hand, is free of those burdens. I'm jealous of him, in some ways.
The reason most people in this movie are struggling so much is surprisingly simple: they just want to be heard. Something the pandemic did which nobody can deny is isolate every single person and cause any to lose their minds because of it. With nothing but social media algorithms feeding us a carefully constructed version of a world we want to believe exists, it's little wonder how so many developed such a warped perception of reality that persists today. But then, once we all got to re-enter the world, it was easier to keep up the delusion, even when the contrary stares you in the face, because the alternative is accepting that you wasted a year and half on a lie.
We all, more than anything in the world, need people to hear us. It's ingrained in us from birth. We all suffer in the same world, but we refuse to suffer alone. Like I said before, when I came out of Eddington, I felt desperate to talk to someone about it. I didn't even know what I had to say at the time. I think I just wanted someone to share in the burden that was this movie.
When I initially left the cinema, I think I hated Eddington. It felt mean, but not in a fun, sadistic way like (arguably) a Hereditary or Midsommar. Rather, in a sense, I thought the movie was everything I had feared it would be: a deeply cynical upturned nose of an experience, guffawing at the world for trying to fight against itself and failing. After a while, I think my problem became that this movie feels a little too honest. The characters in this movie are just ordinary people. They're people I know, and you probably know too; a whole town of them, in fact. Everybody is fake, sure, but it's hard not to be when you're being bombarded with so much information on a daily basis that it is basically impossible to have an original thought. I wanted to read reviews of this movie, to try and better understand what it was doing, but part of me felt like that was an easy escape from actually snagging with the material. I wonder if, had I done that right away, I would have turned around on it as I have done now.
So after all that – a spit in the eye and a kick in the teeth – what are we left to do with it? More than anything, Eddington made me feel hopeless; the same kind of existential dread I receive from 10 minutes of scrolling Bluesky. For every moment I am reminded of the world I live in, five more follow where I languish in that reality. Doomscrolling doesn't sufficiently describe it: it truly feels as though our lives are not our own, and we're all just coasting through the days until something – anything – changes.
Does Eddington do anything to help alleviate that feeling? I suppose not, although, I must admit, I cannot help but find some comfort in witnessing somebody clearly going through the same neuroses as me, committing that emotion to film for history to remember. If nothing else, while the world caves in, we can lie here together.