A Real Pain: A thoughtful, touching drama

A Real Pain (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for drug use and relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 11.17.24

This seems to be the season for notable entries by actors turned directors.

 

Just a few weeks ago, Anna Kendrick made an impressive directorial debut with the suspenseful Woman of the Hour, in which she also starred.

 

Tour guide James (Will Sharpe, foreground) and the rest of their small group fail to
notice when Benji (Kieran Culkin, in red shorts) impulsively embarrasses his
cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg) with a bear hug.

Jesse Eisenberg, still remembered for his Oscar-nominated performance in 2010’s The Social Network, has done her one better; he wrote, directed and co-stars in this intensely emotional relationship drama. It earned Eisenberg the Walda Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and no surprise; this painfully raw study of estrangement often is difficult to endure, because it feels so intimately real.

Equal credit, as well, for the lead performances by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin.

 

New York-based David (Eisenberg) and his estranged cousin Benji (Culkin) reunite at an airport, en route to Warsaw for a Polish Holocaust history group tour. The trip has been made possible by money left by their recently deceased grandmother, and is prompted by their mutual desire to visit the home in which she lived, for many years.

 

Jewish history and the Holocaust are a grim backdrop to a character dynamic already heavy with unspoken angst.

 

The two men couldn’t be less alike. The workaholic David is sweet and smart, but shy, emotionally repressed and impaired by OCD tics partly dampened by prescription meds. He further holds himself together via lists, itineraries and meticulous planning.

 

This isn’t far from Eisenberg’s frequent acting wheelhouse; his flustered, overly apologetic nebbishes have long been a signature. But he’s extremely adept at it, and David’s deer-in-the-headlights reactions to his cousin’s antics are credibly painful.

 

The bipolar, relentlessly profane Benji navigates wild mood swings with marginal success. At his best, he’s cheery and personable: the life of the party. But in the blink of an eye, he turns rude, antagonistic and needlessly candid, insisting that everybody subscribe to his bent philosophy of the moment.

 

He self-medicates with marijuana and alcohol, which doesn’t help; he often doesn’t remember his previous day’s boorish behavior.

 

Culkin is all over the map; Benji’s manic intensity often lands like a punch in the gut, and his irresponsibility is infuriating. It’s hard to imagine spending even five minutes with this guy; Culkin’s performance leaps from the screen, as if daring us to remain in our seats.

No Sudden Move: Suspensefully riveting

No Sudden Move (2021) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity, violence and sexual candor

Available via: HBO Max

By Derrick Bang

Fans of slow-burn crime thrillers will love this one.

 

Scripter Ed Solomon’s noir-ish saga is given precisely the right look and atmosphere by director Steven Soderbergh and production designer Hannah Beachler. The post-WWII Detroit setting emphasizes the deplorable racial divide between cozy white neighborhoods and decaying inner-city Black districts, and the wary mistrust this prompts from both sides.

 

Having maneuvered their way up the conspiratorial food chain, Ronald (Benicio Del Toro,
left) and Curt (Don Cheadle) are startled by where they've suddenly wound up.

Soderbergh’s camera glides languidly along both sets of streets, as if perched atop a slow-moving vehicle; he frequently employs a fish-eyed lens, which distorts the image at both edges. This adds to the unsettling, overall sense of disorientation experienced by our fish-out-of-water protagonists. (As he has done before, Soderbergh “hides” behind the pseudonym “Peter Andrews,” when he handles his own cinematography.)

The year is 1954. Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle), recently released from prison, is offered a job by shady go-between Jones (Brendan Fraser). It sounds simple enough: babysit the family of low-level General Motors executive Matt Wertz (David Harbour) for a couple of hours.

 

“Babysit,” meaning “guard at gunpoint while something goes down elsewhere.”

 

Jones also recruits Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), similarly down on his luck, who isn’t wild about sharing a job with, ah, someone of color. (Cheadle’s dry amusement, when the two men share the back seat of Jones’ car, is priceless.) The little gang is augmented further by Charley Barnes (Kieran Culkin), who outlines the plan.

 

Charley will “escort” Matt to his office, to retrieve a document from a certain safe. Curt and Ronald will keep Matt’s family at home: wife Mary (Amy Seimetz) and their two children, Matthew Jr. (Noah Jupe) and Peggy (Lucy Holt). The three criminals will remain masked the entire time; if everybody cooperates, everybody lives.

 

The raw intensity of the early morning home invasion is palpable, as Mary and her children are startled by the sudden appearance of these three menacing intruders. Curt’s calming words do little to ease the atmosphere of terror; Seimetz’s performance is sublime, as the terrified Mary — and we — expect something awful to happen, at any moment.