Who’s Afraid of Eddington?
Eddington sounds good on paper: a hybrid western-black comedy by Hereditary and Midsommar auteur Ari Aster about the summer of 2020, when everyone everywhere but especially in America went a particular kind of insane. With a star-studded cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and darling of the summer Pedro Pascal, the film purports to tackle everything from mask mandates to QAnon to Black Lives Matter protests. A master of discomfort tackling one of the most discomforting times in history — a match made in heaven and/or hell. As the weeks have ticked by since Eddington’s lackluster Cannes premiere, however, it seems like none of its stars wants to say anything about the movie. Is it spoilers? Is it bad vibes? Is it too much of a political bear trap?
That’s not to say that the cast and director aren’t promoting Eddington — they’re just not actually saying anything about the movie they’re in. Take Stone, who went on a Diego Luna–hosted episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on June 26 to talk about the bee that attacked her on the Cannes red carpet. She jokes about co-stars Butler and Pascal. When Luna asks her what she does to get into character, Stone explains that since she was a teenager, she’s found a signature scent for every single one of her characters (except Poor Things’s Bella Baxter, who probably wouldn’t have one due to everything else going on with her). When Luna asks Stone what her scent was for Eddington, she goes, “For Eddington I had, uh, that’s actually a good point. I don’t know if I picked one for Eddington,” and proceeds to say nothing else about the movie.
The evasiveness around Eddington goes all the way back to the Cannes conference, wherein the cast members mostly answered softball questions and Phoenix sat with his hands over his face for several minutes at a time. He brought a much different energy to his July 16 Late Show interview with Stephen Colbert in which he addressed his now-infamous Late Night conversation with David Letterman. He nervously admitted how strange it was to be back, with the conversation only drifting into Eddington in the final two minutes of his 11-minute conversation. Once Phoenix and Colbert get close to the film, however, Phoenix mimes getting up to leave. They then practice one minute of silence and the interview is over.
Phoenix is also the film’s sole representative on the new-media circuit, speaking with Theo Von for a whole 90 minutes (that’s one hour shorter than Eddington). In that conversation, he’s as forthright as anyone has been about the film, addressing his character Joe Cross’s queasy rage along with how he and Aster were keen to subvert a stereotypical conservative. “Maybe we’re always responsible for how we respond to what’s happening in the world,” Phoenix says of the movie itself, the most succinct idea anyone has shared about the film’s greater meaning.
Everyone else, however, sits on the sidelines. Pascal has spent the summer promoting Materialists and Fantastic Four. If anyone deserves a vacation, it’s him, though he did do a quick scene breakdown with Phoenix and Aster in which they discuss, uh, the weather. Butler is nowhere, but he has Caught Stealing soon and his edited bulge to contend with. Maybe that’s a good thing for stars with this level of demand, but it doesn’t advance any interest in the film itself.
Aster, to his credit, does more press than any of his cast, discussing his fears and anxieties and the film’s gesture toward politics. “It’s a film about a bunch of people who are blocked off in their own realities,” he said to the New York Times, a statement pertinent to the premise of Eddington as well as Aster’s other work. The minute-long silences and awkward hemming and hawing around the film don’t create an air of mystery so much as they deflate. Can a work speak for itself if its creators have so little to say about it? Perhaps it’s tricky to sell a movie about the craziness of 2020 when the craziness hasn’t exactly ebbed. “Part of me understands why there isn’t necessarily more work about that time, because I don’t think we’ve actually metabolized just how seismic that moment was — and we’re also still living in it,” Aster tells Vulture. “But I think that moment is the last remaining link to whatever old world we were living in.” That the film’s stars have so little to say may make them more relatable than we’re prone to consider them. The moment that Eddington sits within still defies definition. There’s nothing to say, perhaps, about something that hasn’t ended.
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