A good satirist knows that all laughs are not equal. At some point, it must choose a side. Viciously mocking everyone doesn't mean you're a fair. It just means you're an asshole.

In Eddington, writer and director Ari Aster fails to make that distinction. In his vision of America during the first full year of the pandemic, everyone is fair game and everyone is an equal side of the same, stupid coin. Not Aster, naturally, he's the smart one who sits back and smugly proclaims everyone else the problem.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, a hapless sheriff of a dead-end town called Eddington. He lives in an unhappy marriage with his mentally ill wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her depressed and conspiracy theorist addled mother (Deirdre O'Connell). He's not a good cop by any measure, but in a town this small it doesn't seem to matter. The pandemic has brought everything to a standstill. The mayor, Ted (Pedro Pascal), enforces a mask mandate while negotiating for a scummy server farm to be built on stolen native land. Meanwhile, across the country, thugs wearing badges murder George Floyd.

But Joe has bigger problems. He doesn't want to wear a mask. He doesn't think anyone should be forced to wear a mask. So he campaigns to become the new mayor. After all, it's his right to do as he pleases.

In theory, there's an intelligent and potentially incisive film buried somewhere in this mess. A story about how easily men fall prey to their toxic masculinity. How, as a society, we lash out during times of uncertainty as our basic structures crumble beneath our feat. How an entire generation is kept at a standstill because the older ones in power refuse to allow for the same change they once got. Or how, in an attempt to escape the silent abuse in their lives, people turn to conspiracy theories to make sense of the devastation that cannot be reasoned with.

Even a fraction of this would be a lot for a single movie, yet Eddington tries to tackle all of it at once. To do so, it settles for a sledgehammer and ugly sneering instead of precision and empathy. The latter which are tools of effective satire. The former the weapons of bullies.

For Aster, there is no difference between MAGA extremists and Black Lives Matter activists. In his world, it is equally stupid to believe there is a secret cabal of child eating number-worshippers as it is to demand reform of the police. In one particularly mean-spirited sequence he frames the protests in the wake of Floyd's murder as the domain of exclusively rich, privileged and dumb kids.

Worse yet, Aster frames a potential false flag operation so obtusely that it can easily be read as either confirmation of every MAGA conspiracy theory or as a glib expansion of the accelerationist behavior by the terminally online. Either way, because Aster refuses to take any notable stand, it winds up toothless and pointlessly mean.

Phoenix, Stone, and Pascal are fine in parts that require only the broadest of performances. Stone and Pascal disappear from the narrative fairly early, and much of the film rests on Phoenix, who does what he can with the material. Said material, sadly, is so venomous even Tom Hanks would struggle to make it likable.

Eddington is an irresponsible, uncurious, and smug satire made by comfortable centrists who have never had to worry about the things they're mocking. For Aster, it's irrelevant whether or not he offends one party or everyone, because he's already climbed up the ladder. Instead of pulling it up behind him, he sets it on fire in the process, claiming it's all for a good laugh.