Joaquin

The image of a grieving parent is not an uncommon sight on the dramatic stage. Euripides, whom Aristotle called “the most tragic of the poets,” returns to the figure of the grief-stricken parent in “Hecuba,” “Hippolytus” and “The Bacchae,” to cite just a few disparate examples of characters brought to their knees by the death of their child.

Shakespeare offers what has become the defining portrait of this inconsolable experience in “King Lear.” Cradling the lifeless body of his murdered daughter, Lear can do nothing but repeat the word “never” five times, the repetition driving home the irrevocable nature of loss.

In tragedy, the protagonist is often plagued by guilt for his own role, however inadvertent or inescapable, in the catastrophe that befell his loved one. Theseus in “Hippolytus” and Agave in “The Bacchae” both have reason to feel that they have blood on their hands. Lear, though “more sinned against than sinning,” recognizes only after it’s too late the error in judgment that led to the devastation from which there can be no return.

The difference with “Guac,” the one-man performance work at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, is that Manuel Oliver isn’t just playing a bereaved father. He is one.

Manuel Oliver in “Guac.”

(Cameron Whitman)

Oliver’s 17-year-old son, Joaquín, known as Guac to family and friends, was one of the 17 lives lost in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. The production, written and performed by Oliver, turns a parent’s grief into a theatrical work of activism.

Co-written by James Clements and directed by Michael Cotey, “Guac” has been sharing the story of Joaquín’s short but vividly lived life with audiences around the country. Oliver didn’t just love his son. He liked him. Guac was his best friend. He was also his trusted guide to American culture.

Immigrants from Venezuela, the family had made a new start in a country that Guac helped them feel was their home. To convey the meaning of Guac’s life, Oliver introduces his family members through a series of photo images he has crafted into artworks.

The last picture, and the one that remains staring at us throughout the performance, is of Guac. Oliver continues to enhance the portrait. While adding flourishes to the background and making adjustments to what his son is wearing, he tells us about the life they shared before it was tragically stolen.

Manuel Oliver works on a portrait of his late son in “Guac.”

(Donna F. Aceto)

The tragedy is overwhelmingly real. Oliver bears the weight of it by transforming his grief into fuel for activism. The performance makes the case for stricter gun law in America with the heartbreaking eloquence of a father whose life changed permanently after dropping his son off at school on a Valentine’s Day that started so promisingly.

What happened to Joaquín could happen to any of us, anytime, anywhere, in a country that has allowed its elected officials to deflect responsibility for their repeated failure to pass common sense gun legislation. While taking money from the NRA, these cynical politicians offer empty “thoughts and prayers” in place of meaningful reform. The result is that no one can go anywhere in public without eyeing the emergency exits and scanning the crowd for trouble.

Oliver isn’t a polished theatrical professional. He’s a dad, first and foremost. But it’s his comfortable ordinariness that allows him to make such a powerful connection with the audience. He’s onstage but could very well be exchanging a few neighborly words with us on our street.

Oliver summons his son by joyfully remembering his virtuosity on air guitar. Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” resounds throughout the Douglas while he enlivens the portrait with impassioned strokes. The words “I wish I was here” are added to Guac’s T-shirt, and it’s a sentiment we all devoutly, agonizingly share as Oliver brings his wife, Patricia, onto a stage that has urgently become an extension of our national reality.

In honor of Joaquín, the couple formed Change the Ref, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about mass shootings and empowering the next generation of activists through “creativity, activism, disruption and education.” “Guac” is a potent example of what can be done in the wake of a tragedy that can no longer be described as unthinkable.

Ari Aster’s “Eddington” is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

It’s a modern western set in New Mexico — Aster’s home state — where trash blows like tumbleweeds as Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) stalks across the street to confront Eddington’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whom he is campaigning to unseat. It’s May of 2020, that hot and twitchy early stretch of the COVID pandemic when reality seemed to disintegrate, and Joe is ticked off about the new mask mandate. He has asthma, and he can’t understand anyone who has their mouth covered.

Joe and Ted have old bad blood between them that’s flowed down from Joe’s fragile wife Louise, a.k.a. Rabbit (Emma Stone), a stunted woman-child who stubbornly paints creepy dolls, and his mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a raving conspiracist who believes the Titanic sinking was no accident. Dawn is jazzed to decode the cause of this global shutdown; there’s comfort in believing everything happens for a reason. Her mania proves contagious.

Bad things are happening in Eddington and have been for decades, not just broken shop windows. Joe wears a white hat and clearly considers himself the story’s hero, although he’s not up to the job. If you squint real hard, you can see his perspective that he’s a champion for the underdog. Joe gets his guts in a twist when a maskless elder is kicked out of the local grocery store as the other shoppers applaud. “Public shaming,” Joe spits.

“There’s no COVID in Eddington,” Joe claims in his candidacy announcement video, urging his fellow citizens that “we need to free our hearts.” His earnestness is comic and sweet and dangerous. You can hear every fact he’s leaving out. His rival’s commercials promote a fantastical utopia where Ted is playing piano on the sidewalk and elbow-bumping more Black people in 15 seconds than we see in the rest of the movie. Ted also swears that permitting a tech behemoth named SolidGoldMagikarp to build a controversial giant data center on the outskirts of the county won’t suck precious resources — it’ll transform this nowheresville into a hub for jobs. Elections are a measure of public opinion: Which fibber would you trust?

Danger is coming and like in “High Noon,” this uneasy town will tear itself apart before it arrives. Aster is so good at scrupulously capturing the tiny, fearful COVID behaviors we’ve done our best to forget that it’s a shame (and a relief) that the script isn’t really about the epidemic. Another disease has infected Eddington: Social media has made everyone brain sick.

The film is teeming with viral headlines — serious, frivolous or false — jumbled together on computer screens screaming for attention in the same all-caps font. (Remember the collective decision that no one had the bandwidth to care about murder hornets?) Influencers and phonies and maybe even the occasional real journalist prattle on in the backgrounds of scenes telling people what to think and do, often making things worse. Joe loves his wife dearly. We see him privately watching a YouTuber explain how he can convince droopy Louise to have children. Alas, he spends his nights in their marital bed chastely doomscrolling.

Every character in “Eddington” is lonely and looking for connection. One person’s humiliating nadir comes during a painful tracking shot at an outdoor party where they’re shunned like they have the plague. Phones dominate their interactions: The camera is always there in somebody’s hand, live streaming or recording, flattening life into a reality show and every conversation into a performance.

The script expands to include Joe’s deputies, aggro Guy (Luke Grimes) and Bitcoin-obsessed Michael (Micheal Ward), plus a cop from the neighboring tribal reservation, Officer Butterfly Jimenez (William Belleau) and a handful of bored, identity-seeking teens. They’ll all wind up at odds even though they’re united by the shared need to be correct, to have purpose, to belong. When George Floyd is killed six states away, these young do-gooders rush into the streets, excited to have a reason to get together and yell. The protesters aren’t insincere about the cause. But it’s head-scrambling to watch blonde Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle) lecture her ex-boyfriend Michael, who is Black and a cop, about how he should feel. Meanwhile Brian (Cameron Mann), who is white and one of the most fascinating characters to track, is so desperate for Sarah’s attention that he delivers a hilarious slogan-addled meltdown: “My job is to sit down and listen! As soon as I finish this speech! Which I have no right to make!”

The words come fast and furious and flummoxing. Aster has crowded more pointed zingers and visual gags into each scene than our eyes can take in. His dialogue is laden with vile innuendos — “deep state,” “sexual predator,” “antifa” — and can feel like getting pummeled. When a smooth-talking guru named Vernon (Austin Butler) slithers into the plot, he regales Joe’s family with an incredulous tale of persecution that, as he admits, “sounds insane just to hear coming out of my mouth.” Well, yeah. Aster wants us to feel exhausted sorting fact from fiction.

The verbal barrage builds to a scene in which Joe and Dawn sputter nonsense at each other in a cross-talking non-conversation where both sound like they’re high on cocaine. They are, quite literally, internet junkies.

This is the bleakest of black humor. There’s even an actual dumpster fire. Aster’s breakout debut, “Hereditary,” gave him an overnight pedigree as the princeling of highbrow horror films about trauma. But really, he’s a cringe comedian who exaggerates his anxieties like a tragic clown. Even in “Midsommar,” Aster’s most coherent film, his star Florence Pugh doesn’t merely cry — she howls like she could swallow the earth. It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that when Aster catches himself getting maudlin, he forces himself to actively wallow in self-pity until it feels like a joke. Making the tragic ridiculous is a useful tool. (I once got through a breakup by watching “The Notebook” on repeat.)

With “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster’s previous film with Phoenix, focusing that approach on one man felt too punishing. “Eddington” is hysterical group therapy. I suspect that Aster knows that if we read a news article about a guy like Joe, we wouldn’t have any sympathy for him at all. Instead, Aster essentially handcuffs us to Joe’s point of view and sends us off on this tangled and bitterly funny adventure, in which rattling snakes spice up a humming, whining score by the Haxan Cloak and Daniel Pemberton.

Not every plot twist works. Joe’s sharpest pivot is so inward and incomprehensible that the film feels compelled to signpost it by having a passing driver yell, “You’re going the wrong way!” By the toxic finale, we’re certain only that Phoenix plays pathetic better than anyone these days. From “Her” to “Joker” to “Napoleon” to “Inherent Vice,” he’s constantly finding new wrinkles in his sad sacks. “Eddington’s” design teams have taken care to fill Joe’s home with dreary clutter and outfit him in sagging jeans. By contrast, Pascal’s wealthier Ted is the strutting embodiment of cowboy chic. He’s even selfishly hoarded toilet paper in his fancy adobe estate.

It’s humanistic when “Eddington” notes that everyone in town is a bit of a sinner. The problem is that they’re all eager to throw stones and point out what the others are doing wrong to get a quick fix of moral superiority. So many yellow cards get stacked up against everyone that you come to accept that we’re all flawed, but most of us are doing our best.

Joe isn’t going to make Eddington great again. He never has a handle on any of the conspiracies, and when he grabs a machine gun, he’s got no aim. Aster’s feistiest move is that he refuses to reveal the truth. When you step back at the end to take in the full landscape, you can put most of the story together. (Watch “Eddington” once, talk it out over margaritas and then watch it again.) Aster makes the viewer say their theories out loud afterwards, and when you do, you sound just as unhinged as everyone else in the movie. I dig that kind of culpability: a film that doesn’t point sanctimonious fingers but insists we’re all to blame.

But there are winners and losers and winners who feel like losers and schemers who get away with their misdeeds scot-free. Five years after the events of this movie, we’re still standing in the ashes of the aggrieved. But at least if we’re cackling at ourselves together in the theater, we’re less alone.