Since the premiere of Ari Aster’s Eddington at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the word I’ve constantly heard/seen to describe it is “divisive.” It’s a dark comedy set during the summer of 2020 – a time period that has a lot of baggage for all of us – and it examines the moment in our recent history via the lens of a small town in New Mexico. It’s conflict-filled subject matter that has inflamed strong opinions… and that means that it is doing what its writer/director intended it to do.
When I sat down with Aster and actors Luke Grimes and Micheal Ward late last month for an interview during the Los Angeles press day for the new 2025 feature, I made note of the “divisive” response, and I asked the filmmaker about how he factors audience reaction into his work and how he expects his movies to play with movie-goers. He explained that there are certain stages involved when he is constructing a screenplay – but the first time he digs into a story, he is writing purely what he wants to write. Said the filmmaker,
Well, I try to not get caught up and worry about how something's gonna like land while I'm writing. I try to just not restrain anything. And then once it's on paper, it's kind of a matter of keeping my nerve and maybe being smart enough to know what maybe should be plucked. I don't know. But we knew it was gonna be divisive. It's about polarization; it's about division. And we tried to pull back as far as we could to have it be about the environment where kind of everybody is kind of in one way or another missing part of the picture.
What makes Eddington particularly complicated material are the motivations of its characters – including a sheriff (played by Joaquin Phoenix) agitated with the state-mandated Covid restrictions and the mayor (Pedro Pascal) with big money investors in his upcoming re-election campaign who is hoping to land a deal for the construction of a server farm. Elements of their behavior are hyper-politicized and magnified during a tremendously stressful time, but they aren’t specifically acting in bad faith.
The movie itself is about fractures in our society, and confronting audiences with that is going to naturally get a divisive reaction. Aster continued:
Everybody in the movie cares about the world. Every character cares about the world, knows that something's wrong, has a feeling that something's wrong, but they have different pictures of what that is.
The ensemble of characters in the story include the sheriff’s wife (Emma Stone), who finds herself falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole; a Black officer (Micheal Ward) who finds himself the subject of strange attention amid the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests; and a teen (Cameron Mann) who gets sucked into progressive activism to get the attention of his crush (Amèlie Hoeferle). As the Hereditary/Middsommar filmmaker explains, they all know that everything isn’t functioning properly and they try to contribute toward its betterment… but nothing about modernity is black and white. Added Aster,
Everybody in the movie cares about the world. Every character cares about the world, knows that something's wrong, has a feeling that something's wrong, but they have different pictures of what that is.
Also starring Austin Butler, Deirdre O’Connell, and William Belleau, all of the controversy of Eddington will be arriving in theaters courtesy of A24 this Friday, July 18.
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