Eddington – Review

A loudly insane mumbling mental health candidate Lodge (Collins Jr.) walks shoeless down the road. A bird drops dead from the sky. A new datacenter is being installed in a remote town. The homeless man finally reaches a small town, Eddington, in late May, 2020. COVID is in full swing, and people are struggling to cope.

Eddington Sheriff Joe Cross (Phoenix) sits in the town of Sante Lupe Pueblo while he watches social media videos about convincing your wife to have a baby, and start a family. A second cruiser pulls up, lights flashing. A set of masked cops pull up, and tell him he needs to mask up, or leave the town premises. The Sheriff blows them off. The cops again tell him, put on the mask or get off their soil. They are serious.

Joe gets a call about a ‘disturbance’ so he takes it, however masks up to get the cops to leave. These masks will be a remaining point of contention for this man. Deputy Michael Cooke (Ward) radios about the domestic disturbance details, and Cross heads to the scene, cruising back into the small 2000 or so population town Eddington a few miles away.

Joe gets to the bar with the domestic disturbance, which has the mental buddy Lodge banging on the window, asking for booze. The Mayor, and bar operator, Ted Garcia (Pascal) is asking the Sheriff to deal with this unmasked and aggressive man. Garcia asks about the mask that Cross does not wear, and demands satisfaction with Lodge’s actions, who busts through a door and starts pounding booze.

Cross finally rushes into the bar to help, but gets flattened by the crazed Lodge who runs out. The embarrassed Sheriff must return home, to his conspiracy theorist wife Louise (Stone) and mother-in-law Dawn (Bodkin). Fueled by disbelief and his own narrative, Sheriff Joe Cross is on a collision course with Mayor Ted Garcia over the “unfair” world of the pandemic.

While it may start slowly and build up, shit gets straight bonkers eventually. This whole experience is almost too real and likely will bring about some anxiety in its viewers, assuming there is the capacity to take this for what it is. It absolutely is a statement about the lack of education in most people, the use of misinformation, selfish victim-like personalities, and the general political world we live in where idiot asshole bullies can just attempt to re-write reality by force, making it more dangerous for literally everyone around them.

The stellar cast drives the strong writing along through the runtime; however, it is too long at about 2 and a half hours. I didn’t get bored at all, and it was quite well done, but some trimming would have potentially helped a bit. I know the director / writer had a lot to say with this one, so it was probably hard to edit it down.

Comparisons below are more in general vibe than direct story comparison