My 3-year-old didn’t do building factoids. She talked into a plastic phone, then demanded cheese.
“We’re on a fucking holocaust tour.” Earnest, personal indie dramas are a rarity nowadays and Eisenberg’s melancholy comedic travelogue is less “journey of self-discovery" than a throwback to the wandering, dialogue-heavy dramedies of the 90s. A Real Pain finds the actor-turned-writer/director looking inward without exploiting or sensationalizing his own heritage for the sake of cheap entertainment or sentiment. The “odd couple” motif may be a tired one, but there’s an undeniable humanity at play here which translates into a caring, often terse and combative atmosphere of low-key familial strife in Poland.
Is it scary that I saw my borderline-OCD aunt in Eisenberg’s ad banner huckster? As the film progressed, I became increasingly impressed by its sly upending of expectations. We know the fastidious, awkward Eisenberg and gregarious Culkin are gonna bicker as so many polar opposites have done a million times before in a million similarly themed “road movies.” Yet their familiarity and Eisenberg’s perfectly calibrated depiction of these two somehow spares both from being unbearable as either a drip or an instigator.
Culkin, who continues to impress and hone the persona he cultivated on Succession, is utterly fascinating as both the life of the party and the party pooper. As someone who’s both admired and barely tolerated by his career/family-minded cousin, he “lights up a room and shits on everything inside it.” It’s a high wire performance which asks Culkin to remain sympathetic even while being wildly inappropriate, or at least nakedly antagonistic. “Money is like heroin for boring people.” Few of us wish to be called out for even the most mundane of questionable acts and as Culkin aggressively accuses their well-meaning, non-Jewish tour guide of stripping a grave site of its emotional power in service of historical enlightenment, the danger of malapropos behavior serves the purpose of the appropriately double entendre title.
The supporting cast in the tour group is a lovely mix who play their roles with aplomb and the film moves along splendidly; rarely halting its momentum thanks to tiny moments of awkward, often comedic tension. Often funny, yes, but ARP isn’t brutal in its sadness. It’s gentler; like coaxing a broken, distraught person to join you for a hug while Chopin plays in the background. It’s about the past and how some reckon trauma must be dealt with by clinging to life for fear of losing it and others regard living as a simple task which must be approached with careful planning and reticence. A step up in both maturity and dramatic clarity, Eisenberg’s sophomore effort is a lovely, bittersweet ode to those we’ve lost and to those who continue to remember them.
Comments