A Real Pain review – Jesse Eisenberg’s sauntering Holocaust tour comedy is a masterpiece
The writer, director and actor effortlessly walks a tonal tightrope in this film about Jewish American cousins on a Holocaust tour in Poland. But Kieran Culkin steals the show as the more mischievous cousin
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.
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