Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal in Ari Aster Western

Did we all go completely crazy during these strangely strange first months of covid-19 locking in 2020, when cities became ghost cities and people started playing with their mental health by living online and buying everything that the social media chamber has been coughing? This is the evaluation in Ari Aster Eddingtonwhich considers this collective national trauma through the microcosm of a small fictitious town in New Mexico. Essentially a modern wesider marbled with a vein of dark comedy, the film is neither suspense nor funny enough to work either. Above all, it is a distancing slog.

After the classic horror diabolically well designed to Hereditary And In the middle of the summerThe talented writer-director, ASTER, took a more personal turn to territory with the uneven Idipale Odyssey Beautiful a fearA tumble in a rabbit hole of neuroses full of striking nightmare images and poignant confessional moments of paralyzed masculinity. In the end, however, the film felt more nourishing for the filmmaker than the public.

Aster’s fourth feature shares certain key qualities with its immediate predecessor. It is inflated, self-indulgent, disjointed, madly ambitious and laudable, but so gruel that it becomes a deadly combination of confusing and boredom.

The director launches a bucket of ideas on the screen – on American history, racial disharmony, political confrontations, protest movements and disinformation, for beginners – but most of them tend to sparkle before making convincing points beyond “hey, look at the disorder we make of our lives when they are left to our own devices”, both figuratively and literally.

Eddington Takes excavations both moralizing liberalism and self-managed conservatism, but it is so prudent to avoid taking a firm political position that his barbs rarely land. He also respects a highly capable cast in little friendly roles that leave us roughly without you worrying. This brings us back in this surrealist summer five years ago, without the benefit of a new perspective.

Located over a volatile period at the end of May 2020 which could be days or weeks, the film once again puts Joaquin Phoenix, this time as a sheriff of the county of Sevilla, Joe Cross. He was presented by the arguction by the Aboriginal sheriff Butterfly Jiminez (William Belleau) and his assistant to have entered their jurisdiction, the pueblo of Santa Lupe, without facial mask.

Joe is an asthmatic whistle who claims that he cannot breathe with a mask. This puts him in the league, the old Ornery are refused entry into supermarkets, where customers line up outside, standing at six feet.

His anti-Masque position also puts Joe in contradiction with the mayor conforming to 100% of the city and the social distancing of the city, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), which is re-elected. He works with the governor of New Mexico to pass the permits for a huge artificial intelligence data center. Ted argues that this will bring wealth and employment to the dying city, while many residents see it as a new drain on their already decreasing resources – especially water, due to prolonged drought.

There are several thorny confrontations between Joe and Ted in the film, but nothing that really imposes the two actors or has fun with the genre tropes of an old West force test.

For a certain time, ASTER managed to attract us with the cacophony of noise on social networks – coding experts tracing insidious models in 1956 through a theory that masks facilitate children, bizarre web titles like “is Hillary at Gitmo?” And Joe Dawn’s mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) pointing in-depth pandemic exercises to Johns Hopkins two years earlier as proof that everything was planned.

The authoritarian dawn, which exceeded its welcome in what was supposed to be a temporary locking solution, is not Joe’s only headache at home. His uncommonish wife Louise (Emma Stone), whose hobby makes artistic puppet dolls with disturbing faces, fight against mental illness resulting from sexual abuse at the age of 16 and being later forced to abort. She is so translucent and fragile that she seems to risk disappearing.

The situation of the powder barrel in the city is mainly delighted by the resurgence of the Matter Black Lives demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by a white Minneapolis cop. Joe and his deputies Mikey (Michael Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes) are caught in the middle; A video of the altercation of the sheriff with a violent abundant man (Clifton Collins Jr.) becomes viral as proof of police brutality.

The son of the mayor Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and his boyfriend Brian (Cameron Mann) fall under the influence of the protest from protest drawn Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle). Brian’s eagerness to embrace the movement gave the only time when I laughed aloud in the film, when he throws a bite of views newly acquired at the dinner table: “We change the institutions, driving whiteness and do not allow whiteness to rebuild.” It encourages his dumbfounded father to answer: “What?” You are white! “

It is an obvious joke, but it’s funny, just like Brian in a public forum proclaiming that it is time for whites to listen to: “What I will do as soon as I finish this speech.”

Joe increases the temperature by announcing that it takes place against Ted for the mayor, promising to reopen companies and remove restrictive mandates. His half-cooked-sound campaign (“we need to release the hearts of the other”) are equaled by slogans that are unlocked on his car, as “you are manipulated”.

He makes a mistake using Louise’s trauma as a weapon to discredit her opponent. This makes Lou a convert to the cult of Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who says that his personal experience of being sold as a boy in a pedophile sex traffic ring gave him empathy to provide consolation to others.

As I said, there is a lot in progress EddingtonEven more when despair leads to political assassinations and a whole wave of armed violence, while the sheriff of Pueblo Jiminez begins to consider Joe as not only a fool but probably a criminal. But none of the tangled sons represent much.

Perhaps the fact is that we did not learn anything about our national dysfunction during locking, or all that we learned was quickly forgotten, which, in conclusion of a film of almost three hours, seems simplistic.

The actors do everything that is required of them, but no performance stands out in a major way, apart from the fact that mouth delivery and Phoenix punch and punch weariness because Joe gives him the impression that he has already started to uproot before the story begins. The film looks good, but for a DP of the caliber of Darius Khondji working in a physically dramatic setting like New Mexico, it is not distinguished.

The disturbing partition of Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton is a good match for the quality of needles shared by the four features of Aster. But if Hereditary And In the middle of the summer I went under the skin with a truly frightening narration and surprising images and Beautiful a fear was equal Eddington is just boring and empty.