Eddington | Film Review

Jul 20

Eddington Begins with a Jolt of Recognition, Then Spirals into Overreach

The night before I saw Eddington, I watched Stephen Colbert’s interview with Joaquin Phoenix. When asked what the film was about, Phoenix dodged. He fumbled for words, made a joke, moved on. It wasn’t evasive so much as uncertain. He seemed to know the film hadn’t landed the way it was meant to and couldn’t bring himself to fake it. He finally admitted, “I’m trying to sell a movie here,” and the crowd erupted in laughter.

Directed by Ari Aster, Eddington starts strong. It’s set in New Mexico in the earliest days of the pandemic, when public health theater was just beginning to calcify into social ritual. Phoenix plays a right-wing sheriff taking a stand against masking protocol. Emma Stone plays his alienated wife, an art-school burnout who’s papering their home with grotesque paintings and sculptures she’s trying to sell on Etsy.

There’s a stretch early in the film where everything clicks. The world of Eddington feels slightly off-axis but familiar in a way that’s hard to shake. People wear N95s outdoors. Couples yell at strangers. Fear becomes moral currency. I flashed back to being screamed at on a San Francisco sidewalk by a masked woman furious that I wasn’t wearing one, even though I was alone and outdoors and the science had already shifted. The movie captures that paranoia with eerie accuracy.

But it rarely stays in one mode long enough to hit anything cleanly. The film has teeth when it’s skewering pandemic righteousness or hollow protest culture. It reaches, often brilliantly, but fumbles the landing again and again.

There’s a mayoral race. A traumatic backstory involving Stone’s character and the Democratic incumbent. A public slap. Then a sniper rifle. Then a militia. Phoenix does what he’s been doing in his films for the last ten years: a slow-motion collapse into madness.

He ends in full breakdown mode, mowing down masked assailants with military-grade weaponry in a strangely dark and empty small-town square. By the time we reach the AI data center, the abusive male nurse, and Austin Butler playing a half-baked cult leader in Johnny Depp drag, the thread is long gone.

Eddington is a fascinating misfire. The first third promises a film we haven’t seen before, a psychological study of pandemic breakdown with real texture. But in trying to say everything about 2020, it ends up in a million little pieces. Even Phoenix couldn’t explain it. That may have been the most honest marketing the film ever got.

Ian Maisel

When I was in high school I worked as a movie theater projectionist, acted in my school plays, and published a series of autobiographical comic books that I sold at music and bookstores. I’ve always loved entertainment, and at Brown University I double majored in Visual Arts and Modern European History because the history teachers told the best stories.

My career began at an artificial intelligence startup company where I worked as a graphic designer and animator creating 3D avatars for virtual personalities. I used a program called Poser that was kind of like a Barbie Dream House for cartoons. My comic illustrations were published in the international edition of Time magazine.

In 2006, I completed a graduate Certificate of Publishing and Communications at Harvard University, where I studied creative writing, acting, and media production. I auditioned for the student theater and was cast in a high-brow Chekhov play and a low-brow undergraduate comedy where I played a California high school guitarist like Keanu Reeves in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

At Boston College I continued developing my career as a graphic designer and went on to work as an animator at a Jewish nonprofit. In 2008 I left Boston to chase the California dream. I got a job in San Francisco as a litigation graphics specialist for intellectual property attorneys, and I worked on some high-stakes legal trials where I barely slept for a week!

After five years I transitioned into the corporate world and worked as a contract presentation designer at Visa and Bare Minerals. I enjoyed collaborating with senior executives to bring their ideas to life through graphic storytelling and large-scale event presentations. One of my highlights was getting to opportunity to produce an in-house interview with the supermodel Christy Turlington!

In 2017 I took on my first Senior Designer role at Alexandria Real Estate, where I designed high-end investor presentations and art directed photoshoots for major tech companies including Facebook, Google, and Pinterest. The following year I flew out to LA to study video production, and went on to create a digital signage content management system for Alexandria’s 60+ high-tech office buildings across the country.

In 2020 I expanded my focus into social media by producing a video advertising campaign that launched a Visa executive’s speaking career by generating 30,000 social media engagements in five months. Since then I’ve continued designing creative presentations, producing videos, and writing social media campaigns for a wide range of brands including the University of San Francisco and Meta. I love working with high-performance creative teams on exciting projects and enjoy utilizing my creative background to work at the intersection of design, entertainment, and culture.

https://www.ianmaisel.com

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