10/47
David Kaplan: Yeah
Mismatched cousins reunite for a tour across Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the old tensions of this odd couple resurface against a backdrop of family history. The real ancestors settled in the diaspora. Benji Kaplan: We stay moving, we stay light, we stay agile. Benji Kaplan: The conductor will come by, take the tickets, we tell him we’re going to the bathroom. David Kaplan: The bathroom latecomers. David Kaplan: Sorry, we’re the latecomers?
Benji Kaplan: Yeah
By the time he gets 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 twelve dollars. Benji Kaplan: That’s the principle of the thing. We shouldn’t have to pay for train tickets in Poland. This is our country. David Kaplan: No, it’s not, it was our country.
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They kicked us out because they thought we were cheap. 12 Études, op. 25, no. 3 in F major Written by Frédéric Chopin Performed by Tzvi Erez. Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore effort as a writer-director is meant to be something of an unconventional genre. 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 also apparent. The meandering pace, the languid cinematography that asks you to look beneath the surface of the tourist sites, the dialogue that meanders through an unpretentious and unstructured discovery of the meaning of life, the complete absence of any “bad guy,” the near total absence of any outright conflict, the slightest hint of a goal guiding the plot beyond the completion of a simple itinerary… A Real Pain shares all of these realistic characteristics with those earlier, more spirited, life-affirming films.
Yet somehow… it doesn’t quite work
I’m not sure why I never really cared about this film. I think a lot of it has to do with all of the supporting characters (i.e. everyone except the cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin). Will Sharpe’s non-Jewish tour guide, the converted Rwandan, the old couple, the sexy divorcee… the characters are all very basic, very conventional, very boring. The actors who play them are fine, but they’re not given much to do, and so they seem unnatural and lifeless, more like scenery than characters. Eisenberg knows how to direct a camera, I think; he knows how to set up the right cinematic elements.
But maybe he doesn’t know how to direct actors, or maybe he just doesn’t know how to write characters
There’s no suggestion that these characters exist beyond the moments in which we see them, which could perhaps have been remedied by more spontaneous improvisation on the part of the actors. Eisenberg and especially Culkin are better in this respect, but there is; it’s still something rather stilted and “scripted” about much of what they say and do. Eisenberg’s “workaholic salesman with OCD” is largely one-dimensional, and the few times his character extends beyond that façade feel more like forced acting than a real glimpse into something deeper. Culkin is wonderful—a glimpse of his Succession character perhaps if Roman Roy actually cared about people—but I think it’s just a credit to Culkin’s talent; he somehow manages to transcend what he’s been given to work with. It’s a decent indie film with a few good laughs, a few interesting ideas, a memorable tour of Poland, and a solid performance from Culkin.