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More actors than ever are getting behind the camera to try their hand at directing. For me, they always end up falling into one of three categories. There are those who just aren’t very good at it. There are those who end up making a movie that is just fine (not better or worse), often because they are more in tune with the nuances of guiding their fellow actors than with the grander artistic machinery of cinema. And then there’s the third elite category: those rare actors (Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper) who happen to be natural-born filmmakers.
To that sacred company we can now add the name of Jesse Eisenberg. “A real pain,” which he wrote, directed, and co-starred in, premiered at Sundance yesterday, and it is a delight and a revelation: a slick, funny, intoxicating, and beautifully staged road movie about two Jewish cousins, David and Benji Kaplan. (played by Eisenberg and kieran culkin), who are doing what someone calls a “group Holocaust tour” of Poland. The tour traces the odyssey of the Jews during the last century, focusing on the historical cataclysm of World War II. David and Benji also plan to search for the house where her grandmother, who died just a few months earlier (she was a Holocaust survivor), grew up.
“A Real Pain” is full of tempestuous talk about many things, and the suffering embedded in Jewish history (the way the past speaks to the present) is one of them. But only one. David, the straight arrow of the two, is played by Eisenberg in a baseball cap as a classic Jesse character: serious and tense, with a compressed expression that expresses his nervous nature, but this is no millennial Woody caricature. Allen. Emotionally, David is a little crazy, but he has it under control. He lives in New York City with his wife and adorable son, and works selling digital advertising, a responsible, colorless job that suits him. It was his idea to take a week off to take this trip, which he organized and paid for, mainly so he could spend quality time with Benji (Culkin), the cousin he grew up with and with whom he was close (his parents were brothers ). ), although the two have distanced themselves.
That can happen, even with dear relatives, although in the case of these two 40-year-olds, it’s a matter of temperament. David is a sweet but conventional middle-class drone, while Benji is a loose weapon: a brother who never grew up, the kind of guy who says “fuck” every five words, who pre-mails a package of marijuana to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. He will shout everything at full volume. Since he’s a bright, funny guy who sees more than a lot of other people and processes it about 10 times faster, he can (more or less) get away with the nihilistic superiority monologue that is his way of interacting. . . He can also be quite friendly and knows how to read people. However, deep down he is an antisocial misfit, someone who clings to the recklessness of youth just at the moment when he should leave it behind.
The two join the half-dozen other members of the touring group, all of them middle-aged or older and very serious about what they’re doing. This makes Benji the old-fashioned bomb thrower and wild card that is his comfort zone. Jokes, chatters, interrupts, and says inappropriate things. However, he is charismatic. People are attracted to the wit and self-centered energy of him. (That’s why he’s spent his life getting his way.) The film presents Benji as a version of the Magical Pest character, the one played by Bill Murray in “What’s Up with Bob?”, Owen Wilson in “You, Me and Dupree”. ” and Adam Sandler in “That’s My Boy,” the hellish man child the world should avoid, only he turns out to be the life of the party.
Culkin, despite his pace, is not delivering a “comedy” performance. He’s giving a sensational performance as a compulsive know-it-all addicted to self-improvement. Benji has the personality of a hipster slacker crossed with that of a corporate idiot. He is funny, rude, charming, manipulative and will suck the life out of you. But Culkin makes it real, and the film, which Eisenberg has written with the music of contrasting ideas and voices in mind, presents the story of these two cousins: how they interact, what they mean to each other, how they get along. crosses his past. with the present, in such a flexible way that you can touch its reality. To put it like Benji would: This, people, is what fucking cinema is all about..
At first, Benji seems irreverent toward the story itself. Leaving their hotel in Warsaw, the group stops at a monument to Polish World War II soldiers (which stands, in sculpted metal, 15 feet high), and all Benji wants to do is pose next to it. to the sculpture and take a selfie; David thinks that’s disrespectful, but soon everyone in the group is posing next to him.
Things get bleaker when they board a silver train to the Polish countryside. They all have first class tickets and Benji starts ranting about how offensive this is given what trains meant to Jews during the Holocaust. He may be something of a left-wing grump, but what he’s saying here could almost be a page taken out of Milan Kundera. He’s self-righteous, but he’s right, and the fast-talking action begins to sink into a meditation on our relationship with the past. At the site of the oldest tombstone in Poland, Benji scolds the tour guide (Will Sharpe, from “White Lotus”), a British guy who isn’t Jewish, for dumping too much information on everyone. He is right about that too.
The film’s title, of course, is a play on words. Culkin’s Benji is unpleasant enough to be “a real pain,” but the film is also about what it takes, in a world that conspires to isolate us from reality and history, for people to experience real pain. Eisenberg develops the story with an organic flow, and he has a gift for weaving ethereal comedy and seriousness (the unbearable lightness of a good script) that recalls what Richard Linklater achieved in the “Before” films. “A Real Pain” is easy to watch, a buddy movie based on the existential truth of verbal confrontation. However, it has an emotional kick that surprises you. All the other actors make their mark: Jennifer Gray as a cheerful but sad, recently divorced Los Angeles “lunch lady,” Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy as an impassive bourgeois couple, Kurt Egyiawan as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism. When they travel to the Majdanek concentration camp, the film opens to pain and pity.
Benji, the most arrested but also the most thoughtful, continues to insist on the primacy of history. The complex way the film sees it is that his perception gives him soul, even when he is unable to apply it to his own life. He is brilliant but lost, unlike David, who has found himself. I never saw Eisenberg’s first feature film as a director, “When You’re Done Saving the World” (which screened at Sundance in 2002), but I can testify, or at least predict, that he will have a major film career. As for Kieran Culkin, his performance in “A Real Pain” seems karmically synchronized with the ending of “Succession.” He’s just been crowned with an Emmy, but he got his start in movies, playing the hero of the magnificent “Igby Goes Down” when he was just 19, and “A Real Pain” establishes that his brand of counterattacking sass can work on screen. big in a huge way. The final shot of the film is a beauty, because the whole question posed by Culkin’s Benji: can he change and redeem himself? – It is reflected, with disturbing ambiguity, in his gaze. That’s stardom.
