31/18
The mismatched cousins reunite for a trip through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother, but their old tensions resurface in the context of their family history. When Benji and David visit their grandmother’s home in Poland, it’s the site of Jesse Eisenberg’s 39 real-life ancestors who settled in the diaspora. Benji Kaplan: We keep moving, we stay light, we stay nimble. David Kaplan: Yeah. Benji Kaplan: The conductor comes, takes the tickets, we tell him we’re going to the bathroom. David Kaplan: Bathroom. Benji Kaplan: He gets to the back of the train and starts moving toward the front in search of strays. David Kaplan: Excuse me, are we the strays? Benji Kaplan: Yeah. By the time they get to the front, the train will be in the station and we’ll be home free. David Kaplan: That’s so stupid. The tickets are probably about twelve dollars. Benji Kaplan: That’s the principle of it. We shouldn’t be paying for train tickets in Poland. This is our country. David Kaplan: No, it’s not, it was our country. They kicked us out because they thought we were cheap… Featured on CBS News Sunday Morning: Episode #46.44 (2024). 12 Etudes, Op. 25, No. 3 in F Major Written by Frederic Chopin Performed by Tzvi Erez. Jesse Eisenberg’s second effort as a writer-director aims to be something unconventional. There’s something of Richard Linklater’s BEFORE trilogy in the DNA of A REAL PAIN, with a recognizable legacy of Michael Winterbottom’s TRIP series. The meandering pace, the languid cinematography that asks you to look beyond the surface of the landscapes, the dialogue that meanders through an unpretentious and unstructured revelation of the meaning of life, the total absence of any “bad guys”; the near-total absence of any immediate conflict, the mere suggestion of any purpose driving the plot other than the completion of a simple itinerary… A Real Pain shares all these realistic traits with those earlier, more witty, life-affirming films. . . Yet somehow… it doesn’t quite work. I’m not sure whose fault it was that I never got into this movie. I think a lot of it has to do with all the supporting characters (that is, everyone except the cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin). Will Sharpe’s non-Jewish tour guide, the Rwandan convert, the old couple, the hot divorcee… all the characters are too simple, too conventional, too boring. The actors who play them are fine, but there’s not much for them to do, so they seem unnatural and lifeless, more like set decorations than people. Eisenberg knows how to direct a camera, I think; he knows how to put the right cinematic elements in place. But maybe he doesn’t know how to direct actors, or maybe he just doesn’t know how to write characters. There’s never anything to suggest that these people exist beyond the moments we see them, which perhaps could have been solved with some more spontaneous improvisation on the part of the actors. Eisenberg and especially Culkin are better at this, but there’s still something rather stilted and “scripted” about much of what I say and do. Eisenberg’s “workaholic salesman with OCD” is largely one-dimensional, and the few times his character expands beyond that façade feel more like forced acting than any kind of genuine glimpse of anything deeper. Culkin is terrific – perhaps a glimpse of his successor character if Roman Roy actually cares about people – but I think that’s just a credit to Culkin’s talent; he somehow manages to rise above what he’s been given to work with. This is a decent indie film, with some good laughs, some interesting ideas, a memorable trip through Poland and a solid performance from Culkin.