Film Reviews: Eddington | The Life of Chuck

Eddington (15) ★★★★☆

The Life of Chuck (15) ★★☆☆☆

All credit to Ari Aster for not resting on his laurels. After helping reinvigorate the horror genre with the wigged-out Hereditary and Midsommar he could conceivably have carved out a lucrative niche for himself directing ever more elaborate genre fare. Instead, he followed Midsomer with Beau is a Afraid, a gigantic financial flop, but also a rather brilliant and blackly comic Freudian freakout, fizzing with ideas, and one of the few American films of recent years intent on wrestling with our current age of extremes by dramatising the chaos and anxiety that have become a daily part of life.

Now comes Eddington, which puts yet more distance between Aster and his horror roots by zeroing in on the toothpaste-out-of-the-tube moment that aforementioned chaos and anxiety was properly loosed upon the world. Where Beau offered an absurdist reflection of this world, Eddington rewinds the clock back to the summer of 2020 and the height of the Covid-19 pandemic to deliver a twitchy satirical nightmare vision of how misinformation, paranoia, isolation, social media, fear, wokeism and discontent create a hotbed of escalating craziness.

Its eponymous setting — a fictional small town in Aster’s home-state of New Mexico — is intended as a microcosm of America, but is also the sort of place that might once have been found in a western, full as it is of lawmen and politicians operating along clearly delineated lines about what’s right and wrong. Only now these battle lines have been confused by the echo-chamber of the internet, something Aster reinforces by setting the film against a brewing corruption scandal involving a tech company’s plans to open a data-storage facility on nearby tribal grounds.

The film is set up like a western too, with Joaquin Phoenix’s ineffectual sheriff, Joe Cross, drawn into a political battle with Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), initially over mask-wearing mandates, though their beef is really fuelled by some historic bad-blood between them regarding Cross’s wife Louise (Emma Stone).

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The sprawling plot takes shape around the sweet but dangerously naive Joe deciding to run for mayor on a libertarian platform, one that brings him somewhat in line with his conspiracy theorist mother-in-law (Deirdre O’Connell) and sees him dragooning his own deputies into campaigning for him with misspelled signs and slogans. Meanwhile, the George Floyd protests happening across the country have radicalised the town’s mostly white Gen Z population, who are incapable of not centring themselves in the story because, well, social media is all they’ve known.

Aster makes smart use of smart phones to plug us back into the doom-scrolling, narcissistic nature of the era, mixing wry headlines with real news footage, and having the almost subliminal presence of Donald Trump (in the last year of his first term) co-exist with the online rise of a wannabe cult leader played by Austin Butler. Everywhere you look there’s a snake-oil salesman ready to capitalise on the moment.

Aster, too, capitalises on social distancing restrictions to frame his character’s interactions in amusing ways, and though it’s never exactly laugh-out-loud funny, the absurdities of the film feel rooted in a plausible reality, one that all the characters seem to be losing their grip on on. It’s heady stuff, anchored by another finely-tuned loser turn from Phoenix, whose portrayal of the pathologically pathetic Joe slips almost imperceptibly from pathos to bathos as the character’s weaponised self-pity takes a violent turn and the film builds to finale that’s part piss-take of First Blood, part laugh-or-cry acknowledgment that there’s no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

The first of three big new Stephen King adaptations, The Life of Chuck mines one of the horror author’s folksier tales for a rather redundant bit of feel-good uplift. Part of the problem is the surprising failure of writer/director Mike Flannagan (Doctor Sleep) to sustain the mystery at the heart of the story. Unfolding in reverse, the film kicks off with an apocalyptic opening chapter (titled Act III) in which environmental catastrophe and the destruction of the internet is plunging the world into chaos.

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The film initially follows Karen Gillen’s ER nurse Felicia and her ex-husband Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a melancholic — possibly alcoholic — teacher, as they reconnect over the end times and their shared confusion about the sudden ubiquity of adverts for the titular Chuck’s imminent retirement from his accountancy job (he’s played by Tom Hiddleston).

It’s an intriguing way to begin, but even before it abruptly jumps to the next chapter to fill us in on who this Chuck is, you start understanding the significance of the first section and, from there, it’s a very drawn-out journey to a twist you can see coming a mile off — ironic, given it involves precognition. A prolonged showstopper scene involving Tom Hiddleston dancing is undeniably charming, but where most King adaptations have too much material to cram into a movie, this one — based on a 60-page novella — doesn’t have enough.

Eddington is in cinemas from 22 August; The Life of Chuck is in cinemas from 20 August

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