{"id":11562472,"date":"2025-07-17T11:40:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T15:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/?p=11562472&preview=true&preview_id=11562472"},"modified":"2025-07-17T11:40:31","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T15:40:31","slug":"eddington-joaquin-phoenix-pedro-pascal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2025\/07\/17\/eddington-joaquin-phoenix-pedro-pascal\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Eddington\u2019 review: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, once upon an early COVID time in the West"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is where we are, as the lawman says in \u201cEddington\u201d: \u201cWe are in the center of it right now. We are in history.\u201d<\/p>\n

This summer, in 2025, history can barely contain each new 24-hour blurt. It feels less like we\u2019re in history and more like we\u2019re choking on it. So we remember Shakespeare\u2019s perfect three syllables to describe dark political machinations. \u201cOut of joint,\u201d Hamlet says of his country and his time. Like a dislocated shoulder.<\/p>\n

Ari Aster\u2019s \u201cEddington\u201d is not Shakespeare, and isn\u2019t trying, and half the time it can\u2019t be said to know what it\u2019s doing, or how to dramatize what it\u2019s going for. But I\u2019ve seen it twice for the good stuff, and for the riddle-solving of why whole, frustrating chunks of this two-and-a-half-hour American fable compete with the rest of it.<\/p>\n

Aster has taken on one of the toughest challenges a writer-director can attempt: extremely recent history, out of joint and somehow present, not past. \u201cEddington\u201d is set in May 2020, three months into the COVID-19 pandemic, in a part of the world where personal freedoms trump the common good \u2014 which is another way of saying there\u2019s a lot of unmasked transmitters around town.<\/p>\n

Joaquin Phoenix takes the role of Joe Cross, sheriff of the (fictional) New Mexico town of Eddington. Part blunt-force satire, part topical, state-of-the-nation drama, \u201cEddington\u201d is also a Western, an early COVID-era Western at that, with the sheriff \u2014 a foolish mediocrity and the son-in-law of the previous sheriff, now deceased \u2014 squaring off against the town\u2019s mayor Ted Garcia, a crafty operator played by Pedro Pascal.<\/p>\n

Garcia, running for re-election, backs a controversial \u201cdata center\u201d construction project, which threatens to cripple the region\u2019s already drought-prone water supply. The First Nation tribal residents of this corner of New Mexico are fighting this development. Even without it, Sheriff Cross has unrelated and unresolvable issues with Mayor Garcia; years earlier Garcia may have had some sort of relationship with Louise (Emma Stone, underused, to say the least), now the sheriff\u2019s wife. The sexual trauma in Louise\u2019s past, and her present, rickety state, is something her husband does not have the emotional resources to confront.<\/p>\n

Both Eddington and \u201cEddington\u201d trade in soap opera-y secrets and subterranean conspiracies involving dirty law enforcement, incest, male sexual jealousy, good lawmen getting shafted, a small clutch Eddington\u2019s young Black Lives Matter protesters spouting newly acquired racial reckoning verbiage they barely comprehend, and so much more. In the immediate wake of the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis, things are getting hot all over. Eddington does not know how to deal with its present historical moment.<\/p>\n

Unhelpfully for \u201cEddington,\u201d the movie, Aster responds to the question of \u201chow to wrap this thing up?\u201d with a wildly florid action climax. This pits the sheriff against anonymous killers, Eastwood style, but with pesky drones and shadowy corporate interests raising the stakes. The last 30 minutes of the film feel almost completely misjudged, and absurd, but not satirically effective; it\u2019s just a dive into adolescent Tarantino ultraviolence.<\/p>\n

But getting there, \u201cEddington\u201d is none of those things. It\u2019s particularly astute in Aster\u2019s little details and flurries of early COVID. Sheriff Cross isn\u2019t really having the whole masking thing, and Phoenix wisely keeps the character\u2019s bullheadedness realistic, not exaggerated. When the story begins, COVID has yet to officially arrive in Eddington. The pandemic is like the Black Lives Matter protests and the national violence so often flashed on TV screens and laptops; it\u2019s \u201cnot a \u2018here\u2019 problem,\u201d Cross says, partly to reassuring his own crumbling confidence.<\/p>\n