Small Town Tensions

Hey, everybody! Yesterday’s edition of Shiny Things went out in an incomplete state: A paragraph about the special-features disc of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning was accidentally dropped when I pasted it from Word to the Ghost editor. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but it’s there now and this link should take you straight to the relevant section. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Like I was saying yesterday, Roger Ebert’s famous dictum that “a movie is not what it is about, but how it is about it” factors heavily into this latest wave of new releases. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning turned the latest chapter of the adventures of Ethan Hunt into a three-hour anointment of Tom Cruise as the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being the world has ever known, and now we come to Eddington and Weapons, which tell simple stories of communities facing unimaginable challenges in very different ways. Although, if you think about it, they’re both nightmares.

At this point, it’s fair to say Ari Aster specializes in the unending psychic scream. Hereditary and Midsommar found grandiose horror within stories of broken families and toxic relationships, and Beau Is Afraid turned one man’s anxiety into a three-hour death dream … which was also about broken families and toxic relationships, but in a different way. Aster’s latest finds him playing with those elements once again, digging into alienation and depression and misery and wondering whether all of our suffering is truly of our own making, or if there’s someone else pulling our strings.

Certainly that would be a comfort to Joe Cross, the sheriff of Eddington, New Mexico. Joe’s life was a mess long before May of 2020, when Eddington takes place; his wife Louise (Emma Stone) is deeply depressed, the town’s charismatic mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), thinks Joe’s an idiot for not doing more to enforce mask mandates, and honestly, he is.

Pandemic or no pandemic, Joe is a stupid, stunted man; he loves flexing his authority as a lawman, delighting in small, petty insults and aggressions, and he cannot handle the slightest challenge to his alpha-male status. Phoenix is doing some great physical work here, stammering and huffing through a confrontation like Yosemite Sam – as though he’s battling the urge to pull his gun out and start shooting anyone who annoys him. That’s funny, until you remember Joe actually has a gun. A few of them, probably.

Mayor Ted is running for re-election on a platform of tech-bro progress, and that includes opening a data center outside of town. There’ll be money for stuff! The consultants say the environmental impact will be minimal! Everyone should get on board with it, right? Except that Joe doesn’t like Mayor Ted, because Mayor Ted used to date Louise before she married Joe, and … well, Joe’s good at holding grudges. And the more Joe sees of Mayor Ted, the angrier Joe gets – angry enough to launch his own mayoral campaign, roping in his deputies Michael (Micheal Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes) as campaign staff. Is that legal? Probably not. But Joe is the law in Eddington, so whatever he says goes.

When Joe covers his car in paranoid slogans and starts driving around town slandering Mayor Ted on the loudspeaker – literally crashing the local kids’ Black Lives Matter protest at one point – Eddington seems poised to pivot into a comedy of manners. But Aster has something else in mind, introducing various supporting characters who are deep in their own dramas.

There’s Louise’s mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), who’s moved into their home to ride out the pandemic, and she’s one of those extremely online people who has to share whatever awful hoax she’s just been fed by Facebook, yammering endlessly about George Soros and antifa and mRNA vaccine trials. She’s a big fan of YouTube influencer Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who travels around preaching empty homilies about self-actualization that always feel three sentences away from calls to violence. Louise has been watching him a lot, too, and Joe has noticed: This guy’s young and fit and dynamic and savvy, and Joe is none of those things.

About an hour and a half into Eddington, something happens that changes the entire trajectory of the story, and Aster switches gears into what we now recognize as his own microgenre, which I can best describe as artfully orchestrated chaos. Shit goes wrong for Joe in every possible direction, and everything he does makes it so much worse. Well, that’s not entirely true; sometimes he doesn’t do anything at all, and things get worse anyway.

The last third of Eddington is a fever dream of panic and violence, with new enemies materializing out of thin air to push Joe even further into hell; that it’s a hell of his own making is almost incidental. Aster leans heavily on the Coens in this one, quoting the arid desolation of No Country for Old Men and the compounding miseries of A Serious Man, with Phoenix once again reduced to a sniveling punching bag for our amusement. I don’t know that it all holds together, but maybe that’s the point. He’s showing us what it felt like to be powerless in the spring of 2020, and what that did to people. It’s a grotesque exaggeration, sure, but it’s still relatable.

Weapons has its grotesqueries too, but they feel right at home in the world Zach Cregger has created. Cregger establishes his eerie, heightened tone right away, as a little girl’s voiceover welcomes us to this dark fable: Once upon a time, she tells us, at 2:17 AM in the town of Maybrook, Pennsylvania, all the children of Miss Justine’s third-grade class got out of bed, left their homes … and never came back. All but one.

Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher) wasn’t affected, though he can offer no explanation as to how or why. We see Alex’ classmates go, in little flashes, and then Cregger follows a series of characters whose individual experiences all catch a portion of the story.

There’s Justine (Julia Garner), who finds herself carrying the weight of a mass disappearance she can’t explain; Archer (James Brolin), a contractor who cannot deal with losing his son; Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), a married cop who’s been sleeping with Justine; James (Austin Abrams), a petty thief who sees some very freaky things.

We also check in with Marcus (Benedict Wong), a fussy but essentially decent principal trying to protect Justine from the community’s rage, and Alex himself, who’s now in the care of his effusive but overprotected aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan). As in Eddington, the actors are offered the space to give real performances; just because this is a genre movie doesn’t mean it can’t be inhabited by flawed, complicated human beings.

Justine and Archer, our initial points of focus, have both been destroyed by this inexplicable tragedy, trying to claw their way back to some kind of equilibrium without knowing where to begin. Archer blames Justine; so does Justine, as it turns out. The visual contrast between the waifish Garner and the boxy Brolin makes them instantly read as adversaries – even if neither of them has the slightest idea what’s really going on – and Cregger keeps underlining that in each new sequence, as more people stumble onto a piece of the larger puzzle and have no way to put them all together. But we can keep track, and the story gets stranger and stranger.

The fun of Weapons – and it is fun, as Cregger once starts leaning into certain absurdities inherent in the nightmare he’s constructed – is not in figuring out which piece goes where, but how each piece supports the larger story. Even the jump scares are more than just jump scares, once you pick up the pattern, challenging the characters to make sense of something nonsensical. But it’s not incomprehensible, and once the movie gets to its third act the puzzle turns into a rollercoaster, and Cregger gives us something we’ve never seen before. I loved it. You probably will too.

Warner’s 4K edition of Weapons may feel a little light, with only three featurettes offering about 20 minutes of material; given the ambition of the picture, I was really hoping Cregger would have recorded a commentary. But what we get is pretty great just the same. Over the last couple of years, on new projects and catalogue releases alike, it’s become increasingly obvious that the studio’s leaning into the possibilities of the talent interview, giving the cast and crew of a specific project or franchise the space to really engage with their work. And on a project as weird and eccentric as Weapons, there’s a lot to explore; just don’t look at them before you see the film.

“Zach Cregger: Making Horror Personal” finds the writer-director discussing the loss that motivated him to start developing Weapons (“I was in a place of extreme emotional pain”)  and where that process took him, with Stiles, Brolin, Ehrenreich and Christopher contributing their own observations; “Weaponized: The Cast of Weapons” turns its focus onto the actors, with Cregger offering some input as well. Finally, “Weapons: Texture of Terror” takes a larger view, looking at the unsettled production design, subtle (and not so subtle) wardrobe choices and makeup effects that combine to create the film’s unsettled aesthetic. Artists talking about art is my entire jam, and I could have watched another hour of this stuff. Maybe there’ll be a special edition when the prequel comes out.

(Yes, they’re working on a prequel.)

Like Paramount’s releases of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning, A24’s 4K and Blu-ray editions of Eddington devote the bulk of the disc to the feature, and while the BD looks just about perfect the UHD version makes excellent use of HDR to add depth and texture to Darius Khondji’s dusty, depopulated landscapes and cluttered interiors. Night scenes are just that much eerier, too, with the Atmos soundtrack placing audio elements within the vast, empty desert. The bilingual Canadian Blu-ray release, from VVS Films, throws in a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 French dub track and French subtitles but appears to use the same master.

The sole extra on offer is a half-hour featurette, “Made in Eddington,” which gives us the experience of wandering around the set with Aster as he figures out what kind of movie he’s making. This is not a complaint; the documentary crew appears to have been given free rein to shoot whatever they wanted and talk to whoever was available, and the result is an immersive experience of an ambitious, enigmatic project that no one seems to fully understand. But they like the vibes.

 

Weapons is available in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment. Combo 4K/BD steelbooks are also available for both of these titles, because marketing is fun. And Eddington is available in individual 4K and Blu-ray editions from A24, with a bilingual Blu-ray available in Canada from VVS Films.

Up next: A History of Violence gets the 4K upgrade it’s long deserved, as Criterion adds another David Cronenberg masterpiece to its library.