A Real Pain

 

First, you either get actor/writer/director Jesse Eisenberg or you don't. Full Stop.

His frantic twitchiness and searing braininess are your cup of tea or they're not. Again, full stop.

That being said, I still find it puzzling that so many people DON'T get his disarming unconventionality. I dig his defiant lack of Hollywood manner; his angular, ungainly features; rapid-fire delivery and ticks. They make me want to listen to him closely to hear what's on his mind.

Judging by his second directorial feature film, A Real Pain, Eisenberg has been pondering many big questions about human damage, the cataclysmic variety and that which is much more intimate but still devastating.

In the film, Eisenberg, who also wrote the remarkable screenplay, stars as Dave, an online marketer living in New York with his wife and child. He and his seemingly rootless cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin in a marvelous performance that's not to be believed) go on a Holocaust tour of sites in Poland and an added trip to the home of their grandmother, a camp survivor who died recently.

The two -- quite different in demeanor and outlook -- join a small group that Benji, a manic bundle of love and judgment, begins first to smother then to seduce. Watching this happen, as both a fly on the wall and through Dave's long-suffering eyes, makes this journey both bracing and unnerving.

Eisenberg reveals late in the picture the source of Benji's need to love and annihilate and this casts new light on a character that seems intent on being both embraced and scolded. Culkin's work is amazing from start to finish and leads one to wonder if Eisenberg had the actor in mind when he wrote the part; he owns it completely.

The film is psychologically layered and emotionally complex and the backdrop of atrocity and extermination adds an important dimension to the work the two main characters clearly must do to repair their damage -- if they can.