EDDINGTON

Directing: B-
Acting: A-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C+

Soooo how many times are we going to keep writing Ari Aster a blank check just because his first two movies were the critical and commercial successes Hereditary and Midsummar? Maybe someone needs to convince him to stick with horror. Or maybe just stop making movies with Joaquin Phoenix?

There are multiple ironies here, not least of which is the fact that Joaquin Phoenix is by far the best thing in both Beau Is Afraid (a deeply unpleasant, three-hour panic attack) and Eddington, which is a straight up mess of a movie with a few redeeming qualities (like Phoenix’s performance). Another irony is that Eddington attempts to be a snapshot of the pandemic-era zeitgeist of “late May 2020,” and that was the exact month in which I finally gained the courage to watch Hereditary for the first time.

I think most of us have a perfectly vivid memory of what it felt like in May 2020, arguably the greatest collective trauma experienced across every nation around the world in a solid century. Eddington fails to reflect that moment, five years later, with any real accuracy or authenticity—hard as it tries. Granted, it seems to be going for satire, maybe half the time. The other half of the time I couldn’t figure out what the hell it was going for.

As early as April 2020, I shared, in part, that the way pop culture reflects this uniquely global experience for a long time to come was going to be interesting. Predictably, however, we haven’t gotten a lot of it: Covid-19 remains too recent (not to mention variants of it still going around to this day) for people want to revisit that collective trauma. It also remains relevant that a pandemic where millions died but for most of us the challenge was just loneliness and monotony does not provide much opportunity for excitement in a medium like film. So it’s understandable Ari Aster would gravitate toward the turbulent nationwide fallout of the George Floyd murder and subsequent violent protests, and how that fallout eventually makes its way to a fictional New Mexico town with a rivalry between its sheriff (Phoenix) and its mayor (Pedro Pascal), who are running against each other in the upcoming election.

I’m just not sure Ari Aster is the right person to tackle these things. If, say, Spike Lee or Jordan Peele had made this movie, it probably would have been good—it could have been great. As made by Aster, it’s not terrible. It’s just consistently baffling, and leaves you with a lot of questions—and not the kind of unanswered questions that make a movie more intriguing. These are the kinds of unanswered questions that makes you think: What the fuck did I just watch?

I don’t know what the population of Eddington is supposed to be, but it’s clearly meant to be very small. Filming took place partly in Truth or Consequences. New Mexico, which has a population of just over 6,000. Maybe I just don’t know enough about politics, but is it normal or a mayoral candidate of a town of such size to hold a major fundraiser six months before the election? Don’t even get me started on the scene in which Phoenix’s Joe Cross hosts a “town hall” in a local restaurant, the few attendees sitting silent (and masked) at dining tables, not one of them saying a word through Joe’s rambling speech being recorded for his socials. In what universe would not one of those people pipe up and say anything during this event—which, by the way, occurs during a contentious protest that forms all of a block away outside?

There’s a lot of White protesters who openly express their White guilt in over-written and obvious ways, clearly designed as the aforementioned satire, but never quite landing. It consistently feels contrived in a misguided way, and like something people on the right could easily misinterpret as just making fun of “woke people.” Aster’s ideas are far more nuanced than that—he just can’t seem to make the ideas come together coherently.

Both Emma Stone and Austin Butler are among the most talented actors working today, and their talents get wasted in supporting parts that never connect. Stone plays Joe’s wife, Louise, who has a peculiar romantic past with Pascal’s Mayor Ted Garcia but which has been misrepresented in local media. Butler plays the quasi-cult leader Louise eventually gravitates toward. There’s a scene in which Louise and her mother (Deirdre O’Connell) arrive home late in the evening, Austin Butler’s weirdly charismatic character and another couple in tow. This guy shares a story of bizarre childhood abuse with so many plot holes that even Joe starts to pick it apart. This might be the moment when the audience also first says: Huh? It’s certainly the point at which Eddington lost me, and it’s not even the point at which it goes completely off the rails.

I would say that both Beau Is Afraid and Eddington are roughly equal in quality, albeit for different reasons. Eddington is certainly more pleasant to watch and more entertaining, although in its final act it descends into a chaos that is very similar to the entire runtime of Beau Is Afraid. What they have in common is excellent performances—this is clearly Aster’s greatest strength, and I am increasingly interested in seeing how he would do directing someone else’s script. And while Beau Is Afraid was far too long especially for its unending sense of foreboding and anxiety, Eddington feels like it was also made as a three-hour movie, then whittled down to its current 148-minute runtime, somehow cutting out the scenes that would have made it make sense.

The opening shot is of a homeless man with some kind of mental health issue, walking into town. Call him Chekhov’s homeless man: he turns up multiple times again, until he’s predictably part of a pivotal plot turn. In the middle of the movie, there is a hard cut to a group of agitators on an airplane, clearly headed for Eddington, after Instagram video of Sheriff Joe wrestling the homeless man to the floor in a bar is shared. There have long been stories of agitators perpetrating violence among otherwise peaceful protests just to sow greater unrest and damage collective reputations, and in Eddington Ari Aster takes this idea to their most wildly violent conclusions—to what end, is very unclear. He does fold in Joe’s two local deputies, one White (Luke Grimes) and one Black (an excellent Michael Ward), just so he can show what Joe initially declares “a them problem” before the problem creeps its way inevitably into the relationships between the three of them.

Aster is just throwing everything at the wall here. The first conflict, which is the initial frustration before everything else strains the entire community as too much for them to handle, is the debate over public policy regarding mask wearing. When Joe walks maskless through a grocery store and explains the difference between public policy and law, he’s technically right, but that doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. Conversely, Mayor Ted Garcia is portrayed as nakedly ambitious and disingenuous, even if he’s correctly obsessed with following public policy. Eddington features almost no characters who are likable or empathetic (Michael the Black deputy comes closest), and this is an excusable choice only with either truly successful satire or a film with an unmistakable point of view. Eddington is neither, leaving us instead with a truly random and wild choice in its final scene. And trust me, you’ll never guess what happens in that final moment—not even while watching the movie, not until the very moment it happens. You’ll leave the theater saying, “What the fuck?” and that about sums it up.

Can’t we all just get along? Maybe if we got better movies!

Overall: B-

THE SISTERS BROTHERS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

How many American Westerns have been made? Hundreds, surely — probably thousands. It’s a genre that became the first example of American mythology in motion pictures, pre-dating the likes of Star Wars, which dominated the culture in the late 20th century, and superhero movies, which dominate the culture in the early 21st. The Western, which used to be churned out at breakneck speed, waned in cultural significance decades ago. If you want to make one now, and have people pay attention, it really has to stand apart, particularly from the countless Westerns that preceded it.

And so we get to The Sisters Brothers, which is a Western merely as a backdrop. You could more accurately call it a period piece, a costume drama set in Oregon and Northern California in the 1850s. The costumes happen to be those of the American Old West, not exactly cowboy, although they certainly get around on horses. There are no Native American characters in this story. This is about early gold rush prospectors, paid killers, and paid-killers-turned-prospectors. Even those are backdrop details, as this is most specifically about the relationship between two brothers, Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie (Joaquin Phoenix), who share the last name of “Sisters.”

They’re excellent at what they do. The Sisters Brothers opens with a wide shot, kept static and wide as the viewer witnesses an ambush on a house in a wide field at night, bright flashes of gunfire seen at random spots on the screen, barely illuminating their immediate area for split seconds. The Sisters Brothers are two against many, contracted to kill only one of the men in this house, and they win.

They also don’t exactly have other careers to fall back on. They have only each other. They are incredibly close, they get under each other’s skin — but in subtle, believable ways that make it easy to believe these two are brothers. They share a tragic past within their family that set them on this path.

Here is another film with frustratingly misleading marketing. The trailers make The Sisters Brothers look way more “fun” than it actually is, featuring self-conciously cool, snappy editing that does nothing to represent the film itself, which is something far deeper, far more contemplative. Particularly for a Western, this is much more a work of art than of action. Gun fights are messy. Horrible accidents happen.

If nothing else, The Sisters Brothers ultimately demonstrates how truly random one’s life trajectory can be. Where these characters wind up in the end is nowhere near any typical Western of yesteryear would take them. There is neither catharsis nor blowout, no particular epiphanies or breakthroughs.

There are certainly fascinating detours. Eli and Charlie have set out to meet up with a tracker named John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who has in turn captured a prospector, Hermann (Riz Ahmed) who has come up with a chemical formula that can be used to illuminate gold in a stream at night. Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard, here making his first English language feature film, has a knack for sprinkling details indicative of larger themes rarely made explicit in his storytelling. After Hermann demonstrates how he prospects with these chemicals, we briefly see the stream the following morning, littered with dead fish. Where might this stream be carrying that crap?

There are several unforgettable images from this film. A horse escaped from a burning barn, itself set aflame. In one truly horrifying scene, we see a spider crawl right into the mouth of a man sleeping by a fire. At first this seems like it’s just a random detail, but like the butterfly that changes the weather around the world, these are details that matter, setting off subtle differences in each event that follows. And really, it is a random detail. It is also important to the story.

As well constructed as this film undeniably is, I struggle to think who it’s for, exactly. It has moments of dark beauty, one or two moments of subtly dark humor, a few chaotic gun fights. There’s a pretty high body count, many of the deaths senseless, or at best the result of people knowingly yet foolishly trying to get in the Sisters Brothers’ way.

And then, in the end, after being robbed of a climax they only thought they were headed for, The Sisters Brothers ends on a surprising note of sweetness, featuring a brief appearance by Carol Kane. Rutger Hauer appears as the Commodore, the brothers’ employer, and even more briefly: only twice, at different points in the movie, from a distance. He doesn’t even having any lines. The focus is always squarely on the brothers, even during the first half when Hermann and John are intercut as a sort of “B story.”

There’s a lot to consider in The Sisters Brothers, although considering it all is not necessary to appreciate the film. Suffice it to say that the four leads all give solid performances, each of them uniquely nuanced. Any movie set in the American West made in the 21st century must indeed have something unique to offer, and this one is certainly a far cry from brainless entertainment. Honestly if that’s what you’re looking for, this will bore you. I found myself appreciating how it meanders with a purpose, and found its conclusion oddly satisfying considering how surprisingly subdued it is in the end.

There’s a lot more going on here than you might think.

Overall: B+

HOSTILES

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

I see a movie like Hostiles and I immediately want to know what Native Americans think of it. Westerns, as arguably the biggest contributor to American mythology in the twentieth century, have evolved a great deal over the decades. It's not so easy now just to make a movie about cowboy heroes who defeat Indian villains. Neither fit into such neat categories, and Hostiles is clearly being very deliberate about that.

Unlike, say, Wind River, though, the iMDB.com page for Hostiles has no discussion about Native American community involvement or response to the project. On the other hand, here's a take from Indian Country Today: "A Profound Respect for Native Culture, A Gut Punch of Reality." Having woefully little working knowledge of said culture beyond what I've seen in movies that historically treated Native Americans with little to no respect, I guess there's some comfort in at least one voice with far more authority than mine on the subject being pleased with the film, or at least its portrayals. And it's always good to know the Native American characters -- of which there are several here -- are played by actual Native American actors.

And, indeed, rare has a Western been this complexly layered since Unforgiven, although, truth be told, this film is nowhere near as solid as that, at least in terms of story arc. Much has been made among critics of the brutality giving way to redemption in this film, but I'm not so convinced Hostiles truly earns the redemption it gives its Native-hating lead character (played flawlessly by Christian Bale).

In terms of the brutality, the story is pretty horrifying from the start: we see a group of horse-stealing Native Americans massacre an entire family, failing to catch only the mother, Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), leaving her widowed and childless, all three of her children -- one of them a baby -- shot and killed. Next we move to a fort in New Mexico where we meet a soldier named Captain Joseph J. Blocker (Bale), and we learn right quick that he has a long history of slaughtering Native Americans -- men, women, children, you name it. He has as much contempt for Native Americans as any man has had in American cinema, or so it would seem at first.

And here is where things get complicated, not just in terms of plot, but in terms of how well Hostiles works as a story. The script was based on a manuscript found by the widow of Donald E. Stewart, who wrote Clear and Present Danger, Patriot Games and The Hunt for Red October -- and who died in 1999. Perhaps some more polishing of the script, which is decent but not great, could have been in order. As it exists onscreen, it has Joseph tasked with escorting an elderly Native American prisoner (Wes Studi) who has been held for seven years, back to his home in Montana to die of the cancer he is afflicted with. And over time they bond, as they face an array of common enemies along the way. For a man who is supposed to have such a deep and abiding, lethal contempt for his kind, it could easily be argued that the quickness of this bond is a bit beyond belief.

In a way, Hostiles is a road movie, just with people on horses -- and with people left alive steadily dwindling over the course of the story. Supporting cast here includes Ben Foster as another criminal pawned off on Blocker to be escorted to another town; and assisting officers played by Jesse Plemons and Timothée Chalomet. I was rather surprised to see Chalomet in his small role -- that guy is everywhere this year, this making three movies he's in playing in theatres concurrently (the others being Lady Bird and his multiple-award-nominated starring turn in Call Me By Your Name).

Ultimately, the plot pieces in Hostiles fit together a bit too neatly, making it slightly too Hollywood-convenient for its own good. That said, the characters themselves, and how their relationships with each other are portrayed, are uniformly compelling, the actors each elevating the otherwise contrived material with their superior skill and talent. Hostiles is no masterpiece, but it's certainly worth experiencing, both for its interpersonal tensions as well as its sociopolitical underpinnings.

Speaking of which -- a quick note on its language. It's relatively well known that plenty of Native Americans are fine with, and even prefer, "Indian." I don't recall the word "Indian" once being used in this script, which is a bit of odd revisionist history. Certainly people in the 1892 American West would have used that word rather than "Natives," which is what the characters here use. It feels a little like deliberate and perhaps misguided political correctness. Also: there is one black character (played by a capable Jonathan Majors), as one of the soldiers assisting Blocker, and in this movie, not only is his race never an issue with anyone, it's never even directly addressed. For 1892 America, that seems odd at best, and makes the character feel slightly like tokenism. In this world, apparently, racial tensions only exist between "The Natives," and everyone else. We all know that was not the case.

So: Hostile is in many ways, maybe most of them relatively subtle, problematic. It still works as a film, and particularly as a Western. It's compelling from beginning to end and is ripe for discussion.

Rosamund Pike and Christian Bale begin the dance of the aggrieved.

Overall: B+