This is without a doubt an off-kilter story capturing pandemic-era trauma addled with the discomforts, fear and conspiratorial woo-woo. Its a political satire on the madness that the Corona virus brought out in humanity while exploring themes of national division and the effects of social media. It’s easy to dismiss the film as disjointed and ambitious trying to tackle too many societal issues at once, but its worth the almost two and a half hours sit to dive deeply into the social impacts that compacted people’s lives.
The momentum-free opening stretch certainly felt sluggish but on the surface it ticks all the boxes that make a western: guns, frontier-landscape, a battle with the law and good boots. Set in New Mexico, the story follows a beleaguered sheriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) in his bid to bring down the oily mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). There’s a tussle over a woman( Louise Cross (Emma Stone), a bar-room brawl and a showdown on the deserted Main Street over which a prairie storm threatens to break.
Its late summer 2020, a contentious new political order rises from the spring’s panic-fuelled State of Emergency; no one can agree on what is good or bad–mask mandates, cops, the younger (mostly white) generation’s attempt to “abolish whiteness” – the townfolk’s consensus on reality shatters. Added to this is the effect of the internet blurring the boundary between sanity and madness, reality and fiction, morality and power.
Sheriff Cross’s cross to bear, we soon gather, is how much he loves his wife, Louise, whose awkward smiling face is the background to his work tablet, and whose failing business in weird cloth dolls he supports through reimbursing his deputy for covert online purchases, and who, two decades previously, went on a couple of bad dates with the mayor Garcia. Louise suffers from an unspecified mental anguish and a tyrannical mother(Diedre O’Connell)- the latter its clear is the cause of the former- with a penchant for online conspiracy influencers. Their presence infects the household just as Black Lives Matter protests, fuelled by instagram hysterics, begin to tear the town apart.
Crafted by director Aster with a slew of messy characters who swirl around each other with clashing opinions that involve unhinged ideas. The issues are huge as is the the provocative irony. It certainly will either dull your senses or force you to think. The film paints a darkly portrait of this baffling us-versus-them period in human history, with battles that are a direct result of strained personal relationships spilling into public disagreements.
The script asks powerful questions, playing on the fact that most people want simple, neat answers to complex problems like racism, homelessness, political corruption and sexual abuse. This allows the director to reveal how these major topics feed into dangerous attitudes and actions…
Its a reminder that it’s not “them” that we need to worry about.
