For his latest neo-Western fantasia fixated on uncompromising characters maneuvering the tripwires and powder kegs of modern life, Ari Aster dusts up a flurry of ideas and then leaves his audience largely befuddled! The nervy politically-charged dark comedy Eddington (C-) rolls the clock back just a few short years to the opening months of pandemic lockdown in his titular fictional New Mexico town, and a whole lot of story subsequently goes down. Aster finds ample horror in the built-in anxieties of the darkest echo chambers even as many of his ambitious storytelling conventions often fall by the wayside. Joaquin Phoenix as the mask-eschewing sheriff and Pedro Pascal as the by-the-books mayor appear destined for an epic showdown, but largely the writer/director squanders his setup with characters all dressed up with nowhere to go. Phoenix, whose lawman is festooned with iconic holster and inhaler, is entrusted with another in his pantheon of eccentric characters; and although he’s consistently enjoyable to watch, the plot around this very flawed antihero splinters into such a madcap and preposterous series of detours, it simply can’t hold its thesis. Intriguing bit parts by Emma Stone and Austin Butler enliven subplots served like a sentence diagrammed into infinity. The film ultimately proves reductive, as flimsy as a facemask drooping below one’s nose. It’s often as if Aster doesn’t mind punishing his audience and leaving them perplexed, and the cavalcade of ideas he presents rarely coalesce into clarity of purpose. The collaboration between Aster and his cinematographer Darius Khondji is one of the movie’s highlight, though, creating widescreen vistas blending the everyday with the surreal to evoke contemporary anxieties and isolation, all the while depicting mobile devices as weapons to disarm and cancel one another. There’s gallows humor aplenty and a series of snarky surprises for those who can endure the full expanse of Aster’s fever dream of a presentation, but his brand of satire lacks subtlety and unfortunately his enterprise often careens from daring to drudgery. It’s urban sprawl on a small scale and a near-miss in a sometimes frustrating auteur’s catalogue.