Following up last year’s When You Finish Saving The World, Jesse Eisenberg makes another compelling case for himself as a writer and director with his sophomore effort A Real Pain. This time, not only is he in front of the camera as well but also giving one of the best performances of his career in the lead role. Since scoring an Oscar nomination playing Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Eisenberg has alternated between big studio pictures and much smaller indies. These back-to-back dramedies suggest that he’s most comfortable with projects over which he has more creative input. It’s not hard to imagine a career trajectory for Eisenberg similar to Woody Allen, writing and directing a collection of stories investigating the human condition while popping up in lead or supporting roles.
As A Real Pain opens, Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) sits patiently at a terminal in JFK awaiting his cousin David (Eisenberg) hours before their flight. The pair are destined for Warsaw, where their recently-deceased grandmother spent her remaining days and allocated funds in her will for Benji and David to make the trip to connect with their Jewish heritage. Once in Poland, they meet up with tour guide James (Will Sharpe) and the rest of the group, the overwhelmingly friendly Benji making fast connections with the other tourists while the more neurotic David holds back. As the Heritage Tour makes stops at locations marred by the atrocities of the Holocaust, the Kaplans reflect on their family’s place in its history while also bickering about their comparatively insignificant interpersonal drama.
While Eisenberg and Culkin are aided by a talented supporting cast that also includes Jennifer Grey and Liza Sadovy, A Real Pain is primarily a two-hander between the Kaplan boys. Even though they were born 3 weeks apart, they’re cousins and not brothers, even though they certainly argue like it. While Benji has bummed around upstate New York his whole adult life, David took the more “mature” route after college, heading into the city to sell digital ad space and support his wife Priya and their son Abe. Benji is closer to the rest of their mutual family, so he takes the death of their grandma harder than David does but nevertheless, they find themselves together on this journey tied by shared history but typified by their pronounced differences.
Eisenberg’s eloquent manner in distinguishing these two characters, both in his writing and direction, is what ironically makes A Real Pain a joy to behold. It’s a film of little moments that speak volumes about how these two guys see themselves and the world in which they somehow coexist. David is horrified when Benji wants to do something that is outside David’s admittedly small comfort zone, even if that means talking with someone in the tour group during a visit to a concentration camp. Introverts in the audience will cringe at the carefree attempts that Benji makes at making connections with people and David similarly resents his lack of self-consciousness in doing so. David’s bitterness with Benji’s seeming lack of insecurity doesn’t limit itself to their waking hours; the two share a hotel room and when David looks over at Benji sleeping as peacefully as a baby, the look on David’s face says “why can’t I have that?”
It’s the time of year when movie award consideration kicks into high gear and I wouldn’t be surprised if A Real Pain earns quite a bit of it, especially for its main two performances. Though David isn’t a character polar opposite of ones Eisenberg has played in the past, he digs deeper into what drives this character and why the relationship with his cousin is so hard. But Culkin especially seems likely to earn an abundance of praise for his portrayal of a young man so stripped of inhibitions that he can drive people crazy with his openness while being none the wiser. If David is our main character, then it’s easy to read the film’s title and surmise that it’s referring to Benji but in the film’s subtext about the vast scale in degrees of personal suffering, Eisenberg reminds us that conflict is all about context.
Score – 3.5/5
New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Wicked, a fantasy musical starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, adapting the first half of the Broadway smash hit which tells the events leading up to The Wizard Of Oz through the eyes of Glinda The Good Witch and The Wicked Witch Of The West.
Also playing in theaters is Gladiator II, a historical epic starring Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, following up the 2000 Best Picture winner as the son of Maximus is forced to enter the Colosseum and must look to his past to find strength to return the glory of Rome to its people.
Streaming on Netflix is The Piano Lesson, starring Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington, which follows the lives of a family during the Great Depression as they deal with themes of family legacy in deciding what to do with an heirloom: the family piano.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup