With all the Best Picture/multi-nominee movies available exhausted, my last stop on this years's Oscars Death March is the almost certain Best Supporting Actor winner & highly-likely Best Screenplay winner, A Real Pain, whose title is figurative and metaphorical and part of its problems.
Kieran Culkin (Scott Pilgrim vs the World) is the titular pain (as indicated by the title card being flashed next to his face at the beginning AND end of the movie) in the form of Benji Kaplan, one of those free-wheeling guys who everyone seems to love despite being a, well, real pain at times. He and his cousin David (writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland) are using money left to them by their Holocaust survivor grandmother to take a Jewish heritage tour of Poland and visit her old home.
David is, of course, the uptight Felix Unger to Benji's Oscar Madison and suffers the indignity of watching Benji immediately become the life of the party with their tour group which includes a middle-aged divorcee (Jennifer Grey, Dirty Dancing), a Rwandan genocide survivor who converted to Judaism when he emigrated to America (Kurt Egyiawan, House of the Dragon), a older couple and is led by a non-Jewish English-Japanese tour guide, James (Will Sharpe, The White Lotus). He encourages them all to pose like the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes as David gets stuck with taking photos with their phones.
He also has dark moments like a freakout when he becomes outraged that they are riding in the first class section of the train when "80 years ago we would've been packed like cattle in the back," storming out of the car. He is also critical of the guide, getting in his face over how he conducts the tour. But after these dark moments, he sometimes acts as if he has no idea why people are looking at him warily.
The missus had tried to watch this previously and turned it off after 10 minutes and her advice to me was to do the same because "you'll get the gist of what it's about and Culkin's performance in that time." Since it's only 90 minutes long, I figured I could through it, but I will admit that I wanted to shut it off two or three times because I didn't find Benji's antics cute. I've known too many "a-holes everyone loves" in the real world.
About 50 minutes in David has an emotional monologue filling in some backstory and I decided to tough it out to the end and was disappointed to find that by the end nothing has really changed between David and Benji. There is no Big Moment of Understanding/Change/Acceptance. They go back to the lives they led before the trip, so what was the point?
If this wins Eisenberg a writing Oscar it will be because the Academy loves when actors write - past winners include Sarah Polley, Emma Thompson, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Billy Bob Thornton - and he gives most of the cast some good scenes to play and imbues them with more than just the cartoon outline too many movies settle for. It's too bad that the overarching narrative didn't match up to the details. His directorial eye is interesting and harkens back to an observational style from the 1970s and 1980s; I'll be interested to see more. The weakest leg of the tripod is his performance, which is your stock Jesse Eisenberg batch of tics.
Which leads to the biggest mistake Oscar made - a frequent criticism this year across several acting categories - which is putting Culkin in the Supporting Actor category. He is the titular character and clear protagonist (as well as antagonist), so the only reason he's in Supporting is because Eisenberg is the bigger star and it's his creation, but David is de facto the second banana here. As with Zoe Saldana with Emilia Perez, Culkin will win because he's a lead actor in a supporting category. (The Academy needs to stop this junk the same way the Emmys and Golden Globes desperately need to stop pretending The Bear is a comedy.)
Ultimately, A Real Pain is a minor letdown hampered by an undercooked narrative framework from which the moments are strung.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
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