A Real Pain
This year’s Sundance 2024 U.S. Dramatic Competition program featured the usual eclectic mix of voices from the indie film world, with stories coming from different races, classes, genders and backgrounds. All three films in this dispatch could be called character studies, but what’s exciting is how vastly different they are from each other and that at least one of them will be talked about all year.
That one is the incredible leap that writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg takes with his sophomore feature, “A Real Pain.” I felt like his Sundance debut “When You Finish Saving the World” didn’t work because it seemed to me like a movie that didn’t really like its characters. This one is exactly the opposite. It’s a profoundly empathetic piece about how well we can understand each other’s pain and how little that should stop us from sympathizing anyway. It’s about people who are going through one of the darkest chapters in human history as tourists removed by time and circumstance from what they’re actually reflecting on but respectful towards it nonetheless. And it’s also about two cousins leading very different lives who try to understand each other but eventually realize they never will.
It’s a rich script that just won Sundance’s jury award for writing, nuanced character study as artifact of a time and place people (me) could talk about for hours (the jury), but Kieran Culkin gives a performance in this movie that makes it impossible for anyone else to matter. His recent Emmy win proves he will be a force to reckon with for years off HBO’s “Succession,” even if this were not happening immediately after I watched him do 95 minutes of raw and organic acting across from Jesse Eisenberg at age 39 in “A Real Pain.” No hyperbole when I tell you that this is one of the best performances I’ve seen out of anything playing any part of Sundance over the last decade.
But wait, who is Benji? Have you ever known anyone like this? I bet most everyone reading this has someone in their head right now: that friend of yours who shows up to the airport four hours early not because they’re worried about getting through security and making it to the gate on time but because they want to meet people, because being at home alone on their couch waiting for their flight is just too lonely. By the time you park your car and walk into the bar where you’re meeting them, they’ll already know all the names of everyone sitting around your table and half the people standing in line behind you. They are a person who likes people, and someone who always seems genuinely curious about whoever he or she happens to be talking with. But Benji is also very sad. You can see it in Culkin’s eyes. And when he embarks with his cousin David (Jesse Eisenberg, doing some of his best film work ever) on this trip joining a tour group in Poland that will take them to a concentration camp before splitting off so they can see the house where their grandmother was raised together (the actual house belongs to Jesse Eisenberg’s grandma) we learn that Benji was very close with her and that she died relatively recently, so this journey represents an opportunity for closure as well as mourning.
Culkin takes an overly flamboyant role the frenetic sidekick is a train that’s been ridden before and gives it truth, something that comes from feelings he can’t control. And while this duo on paper feels a little too pat Benji is too wild and David too cautious they become, for two performers, such brothers in believability that they are. They’re two people who want to know, maybe even be more like each other, and they have to go all the way back to where their grandmother is from to realize both of them are limited. Without spoiling anything about it, they don’t find some kind of sappy Hollywood ending that makes them closer, but they do leave with a better idea not of one another but themselves.
In India Donaldson’s strong debut “Good One,” a very different kind of trip is taken, starring the naturally excellent Lily Collias in a breakout performance. She plays Sam, a 17 year old on a camping trip in the Catskills with her dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). Matt’s son was supposed to come but his teenage apathy has been amplified by mom and dad getting divorced. He doesn’t feel like walking through the woods with pop. At first there’s almost this sad-sack sympathy built up for Matt; McCarthy does well playing this character flat emotionally because he’s going through such a hard time in his life and his kid isn’t there for him. Chris at least has a “good one.”
Donaldson mostly acts as observer here she’s like the fourth person on this trip through these lovingly shot woods. Chris is kind of an asshole type A personality who mocks Matt’s physical shape and accuses Sam of packing wrong when she says he did it we believe her; it probably wasn’t the first time he blamed her for his shortcomings. Le Gros deftly captures the kind of guy who gently pushes people around in every aspect of his life. It led to the divorce from Sam’s mother, and now she’s about to have a half-sister with Chris’ new much younger wife. He’s that guy, and it’s obvious from the get go. Matt is harder to peg until he isn’t.
Both Chris and Matt leave these woods as failures whose circumstances can’t be spoiled, but what works so well about “Good One” is how it mirrors its protagonist’s observational skill. Collias has an uncanny ability to do something often difficult for actors her age: listen. A lot of young actors often look like they’re waiting for their turn to say their line rather than existing in the moment, reacting off their scene partner’s dialogue and actions. In all of “Good One,” Collias roots the film as a character winner who leaves those woods victorious in both senses of the word actorly.
Ultimately, we have Nathan Silver’s fun and sweet “Between the Temples,” as another proof of his talent after “Asteroid City” which starred middle-aged Jason Schwartzman who will definitely become one of a kind. He plays Ben Gottlieb (‘Even my name is past tense’), a cantor whose faith and ability to sing were taken away by grief; until a grade school teacher named Carol Kessler (Carol Kane) comes back into his life with the desire to be his Bat Mitzvah student. More than just another ‘May/December’ awkward comedy, “Between the Temples” is a shaggy character study, an amorphously structured examination of people with strong performances, 16mm photography from Sean Price Williams and kinetic editing from John Magary.
“Between the Temples” has supporting characters that feel like archetypes doting mother (Caroline Aaron), meddling rabbi (Robert Smigel), love interest in the rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein) because it is the kind of Sundance comedy that probably shouldn’t work. It should be too cutesy or twee or laden with life lessons. What keeps working about much of Silver’s filmography is how many traps it avoids, reminding us how this can still be done well when it feels focused on character and truth instead of theme or message. It’s a hard movie to make sound appealing in that the market is filled with insufferable stories about very different people finding common ground they both need to heal but a reminder that there are still ways for films like this to get made when they’re good and healing can come from anywhere. Even funny places.
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