With no great fanfare, Jesse Eisenberg has just given us a masterpiece. This is an effortlessly witty, fluent and astringent comedy with a very serious overcurrent. It is a road movie which is partly about the Holocaust and about America’s third-generation attempt at coming to terms with it, at confronting what their parents and grandparents found too painfully recent to revisit, or necessary to forget in order to survive. And partly it’s about family, male friendship and growing older. The movie affects a cool, sauntering tonal balance, teetering between the trivial and the world-historically important, with even the title glancing at the idea of someone being annoying … or experiencing authentic suffering.
As writer, director and joint lead actor, Eisenberg generously allows his film to be dominated by co-star Kieran Culkin, whose performance is heartbreaking and hilarious – comparable to his Roman Roy from TV’s Succession, but with something else, something more unreadable. His face is always alive with irony, comedy, playful hostility and mischief, switching moods with quicksilver speed. But Eisenberg finally lets his camera rest on Culkin’s immobile and mysterious face, in which, after a few silent moments, his future older self is revealed. He could be any age from 20 to 40.
Eisenberg and Culkin play David and Benji, two cousins from New York, respectively uptight and free-spirited, who go to Poland to visit the childhood home of their late grandmother: a formidable woman and Holocaust survivor whom Benji has decided was the only person who ever really understood him. Eisenberg leaves it up to us to decide how much of this remembered closeness was real and how much the troubled Benji has exaggerated or invented – or if, without consciously realising it, he is using his grandmother’s giant historical tragedy to cauterise his own anxiety. Certainly it becomes clear that her opinion of him was more complicated than Benji realises, and that his memories may be a diversionary tactic to stop himself thinking about a recent personal crisis about which David is deeply concerned.
The two join an organised tour, run by earnest British guide James (a nicely underplayed turn from Will Sharpe), and the group includes worldly divorcee Marcia, played by Jennifer Grey, and a Rwandan Jewish convert, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan). Nobody uses terms such as “bipolar” or “ADHD”, but Benji is hilariously unfiltered and tactless, a natural disruptor without a profit motive, always failing to read verbal cues, and with a habit of telling people what to do. And yet in his eccentricity and openness, he somehow charms the very characters you spend entire scenes expecting him to offend. He is cordially contemptuous of David’s boring straight job selling online ad banners, and always trying to loosen him up with the brick of weed he has smuggled in.
Culkin has superb comic moments which he conjures from serious situations. Benji capriciously claims the moral high ground of outrage at the historic irony of a Holocaust tour group sitting on a train – on the same tracks that carried their forebears to their brutal destiny – and doing so what’s more in first class, a moment of self-knowledge which ends in farce. He persuades the entire group to join in with goofily clowning around at the Warsaw Uprising memorial – and somehow the diffident David, who thinks it is in bad taste, is put in the wrong. And when Eloge tells the group he converted to Judaism as a result of his experience of the Rwandan genocide, Benji’s instantaneous, explosive reaction is superb in its childlike honesty and wonder. The laughs he gets don’t compromise the seriousness of the scenes when they reach the site of the death camp.
The film works with an easy swing, which sadly eluded Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry in their recent, well-intentioned film Treasure on very much the same subject. It isn’t a stretch to compare it to the spirit of 70s pictures by Bob Rafelson or Woody Allen. Both Culkin and Eisenberg are excellent and this is such a pleasure.
• A Real Pain is in UK and Irish cinemas from 8 January.
