Film review: Eddington, The Naked Gun

Eddington

We may never collectively properly address what happened to society during the COVID lockdown. Art specifically struggles to reason with real-life events, especially when the wounds are still so fresh and painful. Art finds a way to metaphorically address a complication, while avoiding calling a spade a spade. Art can often be self-conscious and tiptoe around a subject without saying its name out loud. A pandemic becomes a war, a disease becomes an infection, your weird truther uncle becomes a brainless zombie. Our lockdown becomes a dystopian isolation.

Thank the heavens we have someone like Ari Aster at the height of his career, throwing subtlety in the gutter where it belongs. In the sacred quote from that magnificent British comedy, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, “I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards, every one of them.”

Eddington is set in 2020, in the height of the pandemic, when communities were being torn apart by the very innocuous disagreement of “wearing masks to avoid spreading a potentially deadly disease with no cure”. Some people were somehow against this. Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is the Sheriff of a small town in New Mexico and adamant against masks (“can’t breathe with them”), while the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is a prototypical democrat politician who embraces the lockdown rules but does little to address the growing division happening in his community.

After an incident at the local supermarket, Joe decides to run for mayor against Garcia, using Trump-like rhetoric and slogans to connect with reactionary side of his audience, much to the chagrin of his wife, Louise (Emma Stone), a recluse artist torn between her own spiritual sensibility, honed by a mysterious cult leader (Austin Butler), and a mother (Deirdre O’Connell) who sends her hateful conspiracy theory. It’s personal between Joe and Ted because of an incident involving Louise when they were all in high school.

Then there’s Ted’s son, Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka), who is active in the local Black Lives Matter/Antifa movement, maybe more as a way to impress Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) and less because they believe in the activism; all clashes in a town already suffering from its own divisions with the neighbouring Pueblo people.

Eddington, the town, is expectedly a sandbox for Aster to play his own demented version of America. He’s a filmmaker who started by clanging his teeth into a type of confronting horror, with Hereditary and Midsommar, but pivoted to his own brand of satire with Beau is Afraid. In Eddington, he doubles down on that. It’s as funny, if not funnier, than Beau, and the personal psychological meanderings of his own fears and woes are here replaced by an acerbic exposure of our collective madness.

The conservatives are loud, old and offensive, driven by a complete lack of respect and consideration for the fellow human being. The liberals are self-righteous, arrogant, and inherently selfish in their self-awareness – in a running gag, every speech from the BLM crowd is pontificated by stating “we live on stolen land” or interrupted by impromptu kneeling with raised fists, but the group doesn’t give a voice to either the local African Americans or the local Native American population.

The trick Aster pulls is to represent both sides as they see each other and not as they see themselves. Then the satire is cranked up to 11 and leaves no one unscathed. A shot of a mysterious Antifa group in a private jet, doing push-ups preparing for war, like left-wing alpha males, is so funny for being so ridiculous and playing perfectly into the hand of conservative pundits.

Aster’s goal is not to explain what happens to us, but to highlight how divided America has become. The pandemic is not the catalyst; this rift was there before, but it is the moment the lines were drawn in the sand between these two groups. All supported by social media, conspiracy theorists, media, political interests, selfish interests, religion and, above all, America as the flagbearer of capitalism. The one victim of this is a homeless man left forgotten in the background, losing his mental capacity and becoming increasingly erratic. In a way, this system, which by design doesn’t address social differences, neglects the most unfortunate of us.

Eddington is so explosive that even American left-wing critics are finding it hard to deal with it. It puts a mirror in front of their faces, but the mirror is purposely distorted to enhance their own ugliness. It’s only a centrist take if you see the political reality of America as black and white when, truthfully, it’s two sides of the same rusted coin. The end becomes depressing. For some of the characters, it’s a pleasing conclusion to their story, but we know better. Like Aster is saying, after all that, we learned nothing.

Verdict: 4 out of 5
For the cynical filmgoer who appreciated Aster’s turn to satire in Beau is Afraid. This one would pair well with Weapons and Civil War for a trilogy about the broken state of America.

The Naked Gun

This review will hopefully be, fittingly, short. Much like The Naked Gun which runs to a cruising and unapologetic 85 minutes, and doesn’t feel longer than a brisk half hour.
A remake of the classic David Zucker classic with Leslie Nielsen, now with Liam Neeson playing Nielsen’s son Frank Jr., as the cop investigating a fatal car crash turned world-threatening conspiracy theory after the involvement of Beth (Pamela Anderson) as the femme fatale. There’s no point in detailing the plot, for it is a mere conduit to include as many jokes as possible. And in that sense, The Naked Gun delivers exactly what it promises.

We look fondly at the legacy of the original films, a trilogy of spoof-slapstick comedy made by arguably the best people in the business to ever deliver this genre, next to, maybe, Mel Brooks. Zucker and his partners Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker (abbreviated to ZAZ) perfected the style of delivering a barrage of jokes with the earnestness of the genre they were spoofing. Rarely breaking the fourth wall, their trick was to play the jokes with the utmost sincerity and let the audience figure them out. Some of them are in-your-face, but the memorable ones – the play on words, the background jokes – are probably some of the best in modern American cinema.

But since then the style was diluted to please the lowest common denominator, after a series of low-brow genre spoofs that started with the offensively bad Scary Movie and only got worst after. It was like we had lost forever a quintessentially American genre.

So I’m happy to say that director Akiva Schaffer (from the music group Lonely Island) and his writing partners Dan Gregor and Doug Mand keep that flame alive. The Naked Gun is funny. Sometimes hilarious. Almost every single joke lands, and some work so well that I circled back to not laughing because I was rather emotional at witnessing someone keeping this subgenre alive.

Schaffer studied the visual language of the original to a T, though I think he could have done with a couple more background gags, mostly as they are my personal favourites from the original. The casting of Neeson and Anderson is inspiring. Both nail the energy and chemistry Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley had in the original. Anderson, in particular, is fantastic as an elevated spoof of the prototype of the femme fatale, and is the highlight of the film – a hilarious scat performance.

See it this way – if I need to do a quick toilet run in the middle of a screening, I can usually figure out the best time to scoot out for two minutes and safely know I’m not missing much. In The Naked Gun, I struggled and instantly regretted risking it. My friend when I returned admitted I had just “missed out on a bunch of great jokes”, because of course I had.

There is respect for the legacy. The film is bookended by jokes about the spirit of Leslie Nielsen (and a fantastic gag that addresses the elephant in the room, O.J. Simpson). But what I found impressive is how Schaffer and his writers don’t fall into the traps of modern comedies. There is no interest in offending or punching down, no interest in trying to be edgy and confronting for the sake of exposure. It really feels like a group of people gathered at a table and tried to include the highest number of visual jokes into the shortest script possible. And the result is more than positive – a pleasant callback to a time that doesn’t exist anymore. Well constructed, respectful to its legacy, and, above all, so so funny.

Verdict: 3.5 out of 5
For anyone who continuously replays the same films on DVD (Airplane!, Blazing Saddles, Spaceballs, The Naked Gun, Top Secret). Rejoice, you can add a new film to your rotation.