How Eddington’s Ari Aster made Hollywood’s first, and perhaps last, pandemic-era satire | Canada Voices

Ari Aster remembers where he was during the darkest days of the pandemic.

It was the depths of 2020 and the enfant terrible auteur of Hereditary, Midsommar and Beau Is Afraid – a trifecta of features laced with as much absurdism and alienation as any filmography in the 21st century – was stuck in his tiny studio apartment in New York, polishing up his screenplay for Beau while reckoning with the big, terrifying, unknown future lurking just outside his windowless home.

“Like a lot of people, I was panicking. It was the beginning of something unknown. But I also see it now in retrospect as the end of a lot of things, too,” Aster says. “I see it as the time where the last link was cut to whatever society we were living in before COVID.”

The irony that the filmmaker is recalling the most anxious moments of his life from a fabulously sunny rooftop patio overlooking the French Riviera is not lost on the director. But that is just what makes Aster’s latest film Eddington, which enjoyed its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, such a compelling study in roiling contrasts and contradictions.

The film, which follows a small-town standoff between a sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) and a mayor (Pedro Pascal) during the dawn of the COVID-19 era, leverages the shiny star power of Hollywood’s biggest names (Emma Stone and Austin Butler are there, too) to tell an intensely bleak, if frequently funny, tale of how the pandemic gave society licence to indulge in the most ghastly of behaviour.

In its cracked-mirror world, Eddington reframes the knottiest and queasiest moments of the early 2020s – from masking and toilet-paper hoarding all the way through the ascent of such political movements as Black Lives Matter and Antifa – to deliver Hollywood’s first, and perhaps last, big pandemic-era satire.

“I went down several rabbit holes here. But I just wanted to create as broad a picture of the country as I could, while still being intimate and telling a focused story,” Aster explains. “I was trying to cover as much of what I was seeing happening without being reductive or being polemical.”

Whether or not Eddington escapes that polemical charge is up for furious debate – at various points, the film should please both anti-maskers and progressives, or perhaps no one at all – but it is easily the most ambitious and fearless examination of the pandemic of any movie to date. Mostly because no other filmmaker of Aster’s stature has been willing to go six feet near the subject, cinema having socially distanced itself from the era entirely.

While there have been a number of COVID-centric documentaries released over the past few years – some more hysterical (Nanfu Wang’s In the Same Breath) than others (Matthew Heineman’s The First Wave) – only a handful of narrative features have attempted to filter that particular time and headspace through a fictional lens.

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And, like many people’s pandemic recollections, those few films have largely been memory-holed, shoved away deep into the most dimly lit corners of the streaming services’ catalogues: the dreadful 2020 sci-fi thriller Songbird (in which the likes of Bradley Whitford and Demi Moore contended with a mutated virus called “COVID-23”); the supremely awkward 2021 road-trip comedy Stop and Go (in which two sisters rescue their grandma from her COVID-stricken nursing home); and a motley collection of “lockdown” relationship dramedies that featured liberal usage of Zoom meetings (Natalie Morales’s Language Lessons, Doug Liman’s Locked Down, Dennis Kelly’s Together, Judd Apatow’s The Bubble).

Only Romanian provocateur Radu Jude’s 2021 scathing satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – which certainly fits the polemic bill, in exceptionally admirable ways – feels like a film that captures the world falling apart without becoming instantly dated itself.

But Jude’s film is not playing on the same level as Aster’s new feature, which includes such immortal sights as Joaquin Phoenix going full-on Rambo and Emma Stone being seduced by Austin Butler’s slick conspiracy theorist. To say nothing of the moment in which Phoenix has a meme-worthy physical confrontation with Pedro Pascal, everyone’s favourite movie star of the moment, set to the surreal soundtrack of Katy Perry’s Firework.

In its moments of both unbearable tension and explosive terror, Eddington feels like the definitive big-picture portrait of America’s pandemic vortex, a nightmarish vision that is both instantly recognizable and horrifying to gaze upon.

And yet during the process of filming Eddington, Aster didn’t seem all that eager to discuss the pandemic itself, and how those experiences might inform this recontextualization of that particular moment when that “last link” was broken.

“Ha, no, no. He was just like, ‘Do your acting thing!’ I don’t think he asked me much about my quarantine experience at all,” Stone recalls in an interview alongside her co-star Butler, the pair ensconced inside a different but no less lovely French Riviera hotel suite than Aster’s.

“It was less about my own personal experience and more of the abstract feelings of the time,” adds Butler, the magnetic actor having long since shaken his Elvis accent. “Ari told me stuff like, my character embodies the internet. So that made me go down my own rabbit holes and see how that sparked my imagination.”

Stone, too, dived deep into the rampant conspiracy theories that either sprung up or metastasized in the immediate aftermath of lockdowns, including sites peddling the QAnon movement, a far-right fantasy that involves everything from child sex trafficking to Satanic worship among Washington’s elite.

“I really tried to read as much as I possibly could, just to understand this world. But I think that my character, she’s trying to look for connection in the midst of a moment in which something clearly traumatic has happened in her life, which isn’t really spelled out,” says Stone. “Ari will talk at length about character and the world, but it’s so on the page, too. The way that he writes is so clear that I wouldn’t have too many questions.”

If Aster wasn’t so interested in dissecting the pandemic with his cast, then he was – perhaps unconsciously – interested in recreating it. Eddington was shot in the New Mexico town of Truth or Consequences, a small outpost in Sierra County whose tiny population (about 6,000) and distance from the nearest big city (Albuquerque is about two hours away) mirrored those early days of COVID-19 quarantine.

“I come from London, where most apartment blocks have 6,000 people living in just a single development, so for me coming into that kind of environment, it was a lot quieter and put me back on that place of early pandemic isolation,” Michael Ward, who co-stars in the film as one of the town’s deputy sheriffs, says in a separate interview. “I’d go for walks at night and there’s no one there for miles. That was the vibe, just like when I went out late at night during COVID back home.”

Whether audiences – even the adventurous ones typically courted by Aster – will want to revisit those days is of course a wide-open question. But Aster has never played to expectations or desires.

If anything, Eddington feels as much a snapshot of a moment when the world broke as it is a warning for what might happen should we – America, in particular – never restore those societal links that were severed in the spring of 2020.

“I don’t know how to answer that,” Aster responds after being asked whether the United States has become too poisoned a place for him to remain. “But I will say that I am scared about what’s happening in America. I am worried.”

And if Ari Aster is afraid, maybe we all should be, too.

Eddington opens across Canada July 18.