Cannes: Eddington film review — Joaquin Phoenix turns sheriff in gory allegory for what’s eating America

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

“Your being manipulated,” reads one of the slogans emblazoned on the campaign pick-up truck driven around town by Joe Cross, a small-town New Mexico sheriff now running for mayor. As played by Joaquin Phoenix in Ari Aster’s Eddington, he fancies himself a man of the people and a straight shooter. OK, he can’t punctuate and he lets the occasional homophobic slur slip through the megaphone but surely that only proves his everyman status. It’s 2020 and Covid fever is running high, yet he won’t enforce on mandated mask-wearing — heck, he resists putting one on himself. Thus arises the first division in a town (and movie) full of them.

Showing in competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Eddington initially suggests that Gen Z’s favourite horror director Aster has made a movie more rooted in reality after the high hokum of Hereditary and Midsommar and the Oedipal nightmare of Beau Is Afraid. In that film, Phoenix played a man visibly broken from the start. Here, the cracks take longer to show. The first clues come in Joe’s sexless marriage to doll maker Louise (Emma Stone), vexation with her conspiracy-crazed mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell) and antipathy towards the town’s standing mayor Ted (Pedro Pascal), with whom Louise once had a love affair — or so rumour has it.

After two Jokers, Phoenix can embody this kind of cracked loser in his sleep and he gives Joe enough vulnerability and bruised masculinity to make us root for him, if not actually vote for him. He dispenses shopping to an old resident, dotes on his wife and even promotes the town’s seemingly sole Black police officer Mike (Micheal Ward) — though it soon becomes apparent that not so much has changed since Cleavon Little rode into Blazing Saddles.

Yes, this is a microcosm of all that ails America in the 2020s, the satire spread on impasto thick. Touchy subjects are fair game: child sex-trafficking (“Masks make it easier to smuggle children”), Black Lives Matter and Native American rights are all gleefully stirred into the mix but left mostly undigested. “Don’t make me think,” scolds Joe anytime someone urges caution — and that might be the intended audience mantra for this film, too. To call it cartoonish would be flattering — The Simpsons and South Park have both done a more subtle and funny job of sending up nowheresville America.

But this is also a Western of sorts — and so, inevitably, out come the guns. Aster reverts to type as a lover of extreme genre spectacle, relying on his old friends ultra-violence and gore to resolve matters. Much like last year’s Cannes competition entry The Substance, Eddington in its final act increasingly sinks into a repetitive and tiresome literalism. What it boils down to is a big-screen amplification of a billion “WTF is going on?!” posts rather than any kind of coherent response to them.

★★☆☆☆

In US cinemas from July 18

Festival continues to May 24, festival-cannes.com