There are actors who can shape-shift, reinventing themselves role to role, and then there are actors who seem to bring a certain same essence to each part. One type isn’t necessarily better than the other, though real-deal movie stars tend to fall in the latter camp. Think: Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant, more or less always playing some version of an established persona, and playing it to perfection.
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are not shape-shifters, and that works to the benefit of A Real Pain, an endearing dramedy written and directed by Eisenberg. Both celebrated onscreen and in other media – Culkin onstage, Eisenberg as a humorist with New Yorker catnip like “A G.P.S. Route for My Anxiety” – the actors here lean into familiar types for them. Playing cousins reuniting after a long time apart to visit their late grandmother’s birthplace in Poland, Eisenberg is David, the responsible one, tightly wound and not able to easily connect (ghosts of past parts in The Squid and the Whale, Adventureland, The Social Network), while Culkin is Benji, charming and wounded and a human geyser of four-lettered words, lightly recalling a (much, much) less toxic version of his defining Roman Roy on Succession.
That closeness to what we’ve already seen from these two actors is a short cut, not a setback, vaulting us to a place of intimacy and even affection. We understand them at once – how Benji brings a sense of play wherever he goes, while David, we intuit, is a guy who’s been accused all his life of being no fun – and then the rest of the film is spent deepening, and complicating, that understanding. Their dynamic is a real pleasure to watch, with its not-paradoxical stew of annoyance, undermining, and tenderness. Their push-pull reaps further rewards in how it interacts with the small tour group they join in Poland for a “Holocaust tour” – and, yes, the film is alert to the ickiness of that packaging but also the value in that shared experience.
Eisenberg has a light but knowing touch, capturing tourists in their unnatural habitat: in the cellphone shots of endless landmarks and heads cocked in the universal sign of “I’m consuming culture here,” in the way the hotels get progressively worse along the journey. But more so, Eisenberg is interested in the human connections that are made – bonds being renegotiated by the now-adult cousins, or forged overnight with strangers united only by circumstance. He’s cast this thing beautifully, not just his two leads but also Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) as the tour guide, Jennifer Grey as a fresh divorcée, and Kurt Egyiawan as a Rwandan survivor of genocide and convert to Judaism. I was deeply moved by how they animated Eisenberg’s curiosity – about how humans tick, and tick together, and the vast reserves of pain we carry with us. That curiosity isn’t exactly a radical act, but it does feel increasingly rare in mainstream movies.
What “curiosity” doesn’t tend to inspire is capital-D drama or great gobs of emotion. (The ubiquitous piano score pulled entirely from Chopin – another Polish emigré – contributes to the sense of reserve.) You get the feeling Eisenberg is allergic to phoniness, anything that whiffs of audience manipulation. That restraint, the reliance on observation and not arm-wringing, serves him well in a hushed scene set at the real-life Majdanek concentration camp. But in the film’s hasty dash to its conclusion I wanted Eisenberg, the writer-director, to call on more of the showmanship he’s projected as an actor, and less of a short story writer’s cinched field of vision. These characters have become so dear; I longed for something more climactic, more cathartic for them. Still, for the time we have with them, they make terrific company.
This article appears in November 15 • 2024.
