A Real Pain

F Watchlist

If Woody Allen hadn't aged (rather badly) since the 1990s, he might now be acting and making films like Jesse Eisenberg, who became famous as Mark Zuckerberg in Social Network: in both cases, the Jewish heritage, which is only lived culturally, an unassuming nerdy appearance, which is compensated for by incessant ironic musing about the questionable order of the world in general and one's own inadequacies in particular. In his second directorial effort, Eisenberg plays a Jewish American who, together with his cousin and a small group, travels through Poland to trace Jewish life in order to commemorate his recently deceased grandmother. The journey, as one might expect, leads primarily to sites of suffering, from the Warsaw Ghetto to a weathered cemetery and the concentration camp Majdanek, to the grandmother's house, which, to the amazement of the grandchildren, proves to be anything but memorable. Eisenberg, who is nominated for an Oscar for the eloquent script, oscillates with stylistic confidence between comedy and tragedy, hilarity and consternation, and also knows when his talkative protagonists are better off shutting up for a change in the face of the overwhelming tragedy of their ancestors. But the real center of gravity of the film is Kieran Culkin as the other of the two cousins: an eternal boy who wears his heart on his sleeve, unpredictably oscillating between exuberance and depressive moods, and alternately winning over or alienating everyone else with his bluntness. Culkin, who is nominated for an Oscar for this leading role, fantastically varies his part as an “unguided missile” in the series Succession and gives the film's title its double meaning: tormented by real pain and at the same time “a real pain” in the ass.