Tag Archives: Ari Aster

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Eddington

by Hope Madden

There are very few contemporary filmmakers better able to pick scabs, to generate discomfort for an entire running time, than Ari Aster.

Eddington, his latest, is an inverted Western set in late May of 2020—you remember spring of 2020, don’t you? The lunacy. The terror. The relentless need to move from one day to the next as if we were not actively sniffing the apocalypse. Well, Aster sure remembers it.

In a lot of ways, Eddington, New Mexico resembles just about any place in the spring of 2020. An awful lot of people wanted to ignore the pandemic because it hadn’t touched their town (yet, that they knew of). Others wanted to follow the rules as closely as was convenient, hoping that business as usual would find a way. Others spiraled, whether from terror or boredom or lack of structure, often turning to the internet, many to finally realize that police brutality was a real thing.

Aster captures it all, depicting the way the façade of normalcy had protected us from ourselves and each other, and reminds us that nothing healthy grows on stolen land.

Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) just wants things to go back to the way they were. He sees the disdain, fear, maybe even hate people like him—white, unmasked men—are facing. It is disconcerting—Aster’s hint that the underlying cause of all the harm, hatred, violence, and mayhem that came from the pandemic might have less to do with Covid 19 and more with white men feeling their true vulnerability.

Phoenix is characteristically flawless—flummoxed and human in a way that engenders more empathy than Joe likely deserves. Joe’s counterpoint, the smooth, opportunistic mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), doesn’t get off any easier, and Pascal’s slightly brittle performance is enlightening.

Aster populates Eddington with a collection of the exact types of people forged by the pandemic, though many are boiled down to defining lines of dialogue (“I am a privileged white male, and I’m here to listen! And I’ll do that as soon as I’m done with this speech.”) Still, with supporting performers as strong as Emma Stone, Austin Butler, Michael Ward, and Dierdre O’Connell, even the most faintly drawn character is fascinating.

Aster’s film blames humanity, not right or left, for the cultural rot we’re left with. That may be the most honest and aggravating choice he makes, but Eddington offers very little in the way of fabrication. The town may be fictional, but I think we all remember the place.

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Ari, Are You OK? Are You OK, Ari?

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Beau Is Afraid

by Hope Madden

Is Ari Aster all right?

Asking as a fan who is starting to think Hereditary was autobiographical.

Aster’s new 3-hour self-indulgent opus Beau Is Afraid revisits the scene of his 7-minute 2011 short film Beau, in which a middle-aged man loses his keys and is delayed in his plan to visit his mother.

For his exponentially longer feature, Aster employs the inarguably brilliant Joaquin Phoenix.

Phoenix is Beau Isaac Wasserman from Wasserton and he is living a nightmare of undiluted Freudian scope. Things seem fine as we open on his session with his therapist (Stephen McKinley Henderson, slyly hilarious), who prescribes some new meds. But Beau’s walk back to his apartment is a descent into Escape from New York territory. Escalating tension leads to a naked, corpse-leaping, maniac-fleeing car accident that lands Beau in the highly medicated home of Roger (Nathan Lane, an absolute treat) and Grace (Amy Ryan, always welcome).

But he needs to get to his mom’s house.

Aster generates much of the same kind of primal, ceaseless tension of the Safdies’ Uncut Gems or Aronofsky’s Mother. But he embraces the absurdity of it all in a way the others did not. At times, his film is astonishingly beautiful. There’s a surreal theatricality to the middle portion that’s stunning, but even the comparatively mundane scenes are shot gorgeously.

And as odd as they are, performances throughout are great. Patti LuPone, Kylie Rogers, Parker Posey, Zoe Lister-Jones, Armen Nahapetian, Hayley Squires, Richard Kind, Julian Richlings and a barely glimpsed but nonetheless memorable Bill Hader all add intrigue as they populate Beau’s increasingly desperate and blisteringly imaginative quest to get to his mom’s place.

But damn, it is long. And it asks a lot. Beau Is Afraid is essentially a 3-hour string of traumatic dream sequences, beautiful but shapeless, leading to something out of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. And if Hereditary triggered your mother issues, for the love of God, do not see Beau Is Afraid.

The similarities between Aster’s 2018 horror are legion: the house, the attic, the physically beaten son, a headless body – you’re almost waiting for Mona (LuPone) to deliver the line “I am your mother!”

All told, Beau Is Afraid is a fascinating, gorgeously realized vision and I don’t think you’re going to like it. I can’t say I liked it. I admire it, am stunned by it, and kind of want to see it again. Maybe I do like it, I can’t tell.

One thing I know for sure, Aster is still working some shit out.