The Jewish tradition of placing gravestones as a form of respect and remembrance has a central animating force. Real Painis a new film written, directed and starring Jesse Eisenberg. While visiting Poland with a Holocaust tour group, cousins David and Benji (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, respectively) place stones at one of the country's oldest cemeteries; they try again at the front door of the home where their beloved grandmother grew up, until they are told in Polish by a concerned neighbor that there is actually an old lady who lives there now and who may have tripped over a stone and broken her neck.
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REAL PAIN ★★★★ (4/4 stars) |
Eisenberg's epic film—which won Eisenberg the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance earlier this year—is like that second marker that went astray: heartfelt, strange, full of pain you want to act on, and laced with much-needed humor. . It aI remember the works of Woody Allen, Alexander Payne and, most notably, the humor of Adam Sandler (Culkin's Benji is a result of his extreme anger and vulnerability). But Eisenbergin his second writer-director effort following 2022 When You Finish Saving the Worldhe somehow created a temporary tragicomedy in a style identified as his own.
Or to put it even better: he is the visible one.
The lead actors—a worrywart salesman with an over-the-top drugstore ad played by Eisenberg and a stoner charm-monster who disrupts everything in search of something real combined with Culkin's ferocious abandon—are like a filmmaker split in two. Watching the two characters bounce off each other as they wander through well-appointed hotel rooms, air-conditioned train rides and finally, in complete silence, the Majdanek concentration camp, is like witnessing a Socratic dialogue if Plato had written a few. writing periods of It's SNL.
Filmmaker and actor Will Sharpe delivers a subdued performance as a well-intentioned tour guide with the impossible task of honoring the enormity of what they're there to see while keeping the atmosphere light enough to not be depressing. Like a person lost in a Catskill summer many moons ago, Jennifer Gray boards a bus as a newly divorced Los Angelino looking for meaning in her life. Kurt Egyiawan, child soldier in Cary Joji Fukunaga's 2015 war film National Animals, he plays a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who turned to Judaism as a way to communicate and process his trauma.
Eisenberg seems incapable of a moment of truth, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that almost everything he does as an actor, writer and director now faces the total impossibility of achieving anything approaching authenticity. But his smartest move as a filmmaker might have been to just hand the ball to Culkin and open a hole for him to run with. Like a bird with one wing trying to escape the cage it's built for, Emmy-winning Succession star, fly and crash with amazing transparency.
Granted, Real Pain it's a taste he gets; like a top-flight IPA, it's overly aggressive and calmly balanced. As a director, Eisenberg possesses a preternatural understanding of when to vent when it all becomes too much, whether it's Benji's antics, David's wit or the enormity of the Holocaust.
Like several of the best movies of the year—including Brady Corbet's hit The Brutalist and Tim Fehlbaum September 5, the fun of how ABC Sports covered the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics— Real Pain it shows how we can and must reconcile the ever-festering wounds of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in different ways and styles. There has never been a more important time to listen and engage with those stories.
