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\n People having an awesome time.
\n Photo: Eric Charbonneau\/A24 via Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
Eddington sounds good on paper: a hybrid western-black comedy by Hereditary and Midsommar auteur Ari Aster about the summer of 2020, when everyone everywhere but\u00a0especially in America went a particular kind of insane. With a star-studded cast including Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Austin Butler, and darling of the summer Pedro Pascal, the film purports to tackle everything from mask mandates to QAnon to Black Lives Matter protests. A master of discomfort tackling one of the most discomforting times in history \u2014 a match made in heaven and\/or hell. As the weeks have ticked by since Eddington\u2019s lackluster Cannes premiere, however, it seems like none of its stars wants to say anything about the movie. Is it spoilers? Is it bad vibes? Is it too much of a political bear trap?<\/p>\n
That\u2019s not to say that the cast and director aren\u2019t promoting Eddington \u2014 they\u2019re just not actually saying anything about the movie they\u2019re in. Take Stone, who went on a Diego Luna\u2013hosted episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! on June 26 to talk about the bee that attacked her on the Cannes red carpet. She jokes about co-stars Butler and Pascal. When Luna asks her what she does to get into character, Stone explains that since she was a teenager, she\u2019s found a signature scent for every single one of her characters (except Poor Things\u2019s Bella Baxter, who probably wouldn\u2019t have one due to everything else going on with her). When Luna asks Stone what her scent was for Eddington, she goes, \u201cFor Eddington I had, uh, that\u2019s actually a good point. I don\u2019t know if I picked one for Eddington,\u201d and proceeds to say nothing else about the movie.<\/p>\n
The evasiveness around Eddington goes all the way back to the Cannes conference, wherein the cast members mostly answered softball questions and Phoenix sat with his hands over his face for several minutes at a time.<\/a> He brought a much different energy to his July 16 Late Show interview<\/a> with Stephen Colbert <\/a>in which he addressed his now-infamous Late Night conversation with David Letterman<\/a>. He nervously admitted how strange it was to be back, with the conversation only drifting into Eddington in the final two minutes of his 11-minute conversation. Once Phoenix and Colbert get close to the film, however, Phoenix mimes getting up to leave<\/a>. They then practice one minute of silence and the interview is over.<\/p>\n Phoenix is also the film\u2019s sole representative on the new-media circuit, speaking with Theo Von<\/a> for a whole 90 minutes (that\u2019s one hour shorter than Eddington). In that conversation, he\u2019s as forthright as anyone has been about the film, addressing his character Joe Cross\u2019s queasy rage along with how he and Aster were keen to subvert a stereotypical conservative. \u201cMaybe we\u2019re always responsible for how we respond to what\u2019s happening in the world,\u201d Phoenix says of the movie itself, the most succinct idea anyone has shared about the film\u2019s greater meaning.<\/p>\n Everyone else, however, sits on the sidelines. Pascal has spent the summer promoting Materialists and Fantastic Four. If anyone deserves a vacation, it\u2019s him, though he did do a quick scene breakdown<\/a> with Phoenix and Aster in which they discuss, uh, the weather. Butler is nowhere, but he has Caught Stealing soon and his edited bulge<\/a> to contend with. Maybe that\u2019s a good thing for stars with this level of demand, but it doesn\u2019t advance any interest in the film itself.<\/p>\n Aster, to his credit, does more press than any of his cast, discussing his fears and anxieties and the film\u2019s gesture toward politics. \u201cIt\u2019s a film about a bunch of people who are blocked off in their own realities,\u201d he said to the New York Times<\/a>, a statement pertinent to the premise of Eddington as well as Aster\u2019s other work. The minute-long silences and awkward hemming and hawing around the film don\u2019t create an air of mystery so much as they deflate. Can a work speak for itself if its creators have so little to say about it? Perhaps it\u2019s tricky to sell a movie about the craziness of 2020 when the craziness hasn\u2019t exactly ebbed. \u201cPart of me understands why there isn\u2019t necessarily more work about that time, because I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve actually metabolized just how seismic that moment was \u2014 and we\u2019re also still living in it,\u201d Aster tells Vulture<\/a>. \u201cBut I think that moment is the last remaining link to whatever old world we were living in.\u201d That the film\u2019s stars have so little to say may make them more relatable than we\u2019re prone to consider them. The moment that Eddington sits within still defies definition. There\u2019s nothing to say, perhaps, about something that hasn\u2019t ended.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People having an awesome time. 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