For many years, Jesse Eisenberg was one of my “problem actors”—someone who ruined or inevitably diminished anything they appeared in. Like all problem actors, there was one exception: The Social Network. Eisenberg nailed Mark Zuckerberg in David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook movie, timely then and hardly moldy today; nearly 15 years later, I can’t be the only one mildly curious about the possibility of a sequel at some point. Why not? There’s plenty of material, most of it better or at least more far out than Zuckerberg’s beginnings, and Facebook has proven even more powerful than anyone could’ve predicted in 2010. But for now, Fincher is locked into a Netflix deal, a gilded cage he’s apparently enjoying, despite his movies and television shows disappearing into the ether and quickly as the Christmas movies churned out every December on the same platform.
Until Fincher and/or Sorkin come around, Eisenberg will wait for his Oscar by writing, directing, and starring in his own movies. I thought A Real Pain was his debut, but I missed 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, starring Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore; here, he stars alongside Kieran Culkin, the latter with the lead that carries the movie and nearly led him to drop out. Exhausted after finishing Succession, Culkin didn’t want to spend three weeks in Poland without his family; maybe he didn’t want to play a character so similar to the Roy brothers.
Culkin plays Benji, an upper middle class blend of Kendall and Roman Roy, on a “heritage tour” of Polish concentration camps and monuments with his cousin David (Eisenberg). The film begins with a long, twisting Steadicam shot floating through an airport, following no one in particular; it finally lands on Culkin in close-up after passing him by in the background. He’s arrived at the airport many hours before his typically more-prepared cousin, who spends the entire car ride to the airport leaving fruitless voicemail after voicemail trying to confirm that his Culkin has indeed left his apartment. The layabout, single and aimless, surprises Eisenberg, married with a son; but it’s obvious from the start that he isn’t doing any better now than “back then.”
And the “back then” of A Real Pain is only suggested, never shown, and kept bare enough to leave you curious. Most movies like this—family members at odds reconciled over family trips—end on an up note or disaster. The most remarkable part of A Real Pain is its ending, which reframes the entire movie and forces you to think about the movie for more than the five minutes it takes to walk out of the theater. Like Fat City, this is a movie built like a loop, with a 90-minute pinhole view into the lives of characters who’d likely disappoint or bore us in a longer film or a television series. By leaving Culkin’s character hanging, Eisenberg turns A Real Pain into a real movie, one with a weight otherwise lacking in contemporary American cinema.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter and Instagram: @nickyotissmith