Quick Pics: No pain, no gain
There’s a live-wire rawness to Kieran Culkin’s Benji in Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, something beyond the Emmy-winning snark of his Roman Roy in HBO’s Succession. His character shifts in a heartbeat from anguished gratitude to outrage to cheery bonhomie to millennial apathy, as he joins his cousin David (Eisenberg) on a guided tour of Jewish memorial sites in Poland. With the roller coaster of emotional states, you can’t help thinking Benji might need some serious meds.
But he’s the heart of A Real Pain, showing exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas, and the energy driving along a ragtag group of tourists, some Jewish descendants of survivors, some converted to Judaism, in what is generally (at least from personal tour experiences) not as loaded with sharing and caring among strangers as the film dramatizes.
The central destination is Majdanek, a WW2 concentration camp located a few minutes from the normal, everyday Polish town of Lublin. But the real destination for Benji and David is the old home of their recently departed grandmother further along the route, where they wish to pay tribute.
David and Benji are the classic odd couple on a road trip: David sells internet banner ads and has, he feels, a comfortable bourgeois existence with “a beautiful wife and an adorable kid.” Benji, on the other hand, is a wreck: No job, no real home, he hangs out early at the airport before their flight to Poland because “there’s so many interesting, weird people here.” He remains emotionally tied to his grandmother, who eluded the death camps through “a thousand miracles” and somehow found her way to making a home in America.
Benji’s operative mood is, shall we say, bipolar: he’s either extravagantly offering hugs to the other strangers on the tour (played by Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), or breaking down and acting out in public. He’s particularly outraged when people don’t share his emotional bandwidth, and launches into how “pampered” and “privileged” everybody is, sitting in a first class train car while their Polish forebears were packed into cattle cars.
What drives A Real Pain—what makes it an elegant little gem—is the screenplay, which deftly avoids overplaying emotion or any hint of sentimentalism. Unlike the ominous dread of, say, Zone of Interest, another meditation on the death camps, Eisenberg has a decidedly lighter touch, though you are held prisoner—in a cattle car, so to speak—to Benji’s mood shifts. David is gripped by envy of his “cool” cousin, and a need to announce his own relative success in life. As a playwright Eisenberg, has delved into Holocaust survivors before with The Revisionists off-Broadway; and he found the tone of his two mismatched cousins in an earlier short story he wrote for a magazine. He had a revelation traveling through Poland with his wife: “What if the war never happened? We’d all be Polish now.”
Most filmed Holocaust ruminations weigh heavily on the pain and suffering triggered by the modern-day memorial sites. That’s in here, but the actual pain centers on the two leads. Eisenberg’s David is a charmless, neurotic mess, held in check by meds. Culkin’s character employs sarcasm and caustic jibes (much like Roman Roy) largely as a defense mechanism; but he wins people over chiefly because he’s such a hot mess. People connect to his suffering. A Real Pain is a small two-hander journey that—similar to last year’s nominee The Holdovers—gets to the heart, without bells and whistles.
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A Real Pain shows exclusively at Ayala Malls Cinemas.
Trouble in paradise
You don’t usually look to Disney+ for adult dramas loaded with rough talk, graphic violence and occasional sex scenes, but Paradise—a Hulu original created by Dan Fogelman of This Is Us fame—fills that niche. The eight-part series takes us into a manicured suburban haven with 20,000 inhabitants, where there’s still a country fair, ice cream stands, little curio shops and places where everybody knows your name. Oh, and no guns.
Irony alert: Things ain’t what they seem.
We follow Secret Service Agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) as a crisis hits: the US president is down and his inner circle tries to figure out what really happened. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), a hard-drinking, sex-loving reprobate the likes of which we’ve never seen before in the Oval Office (hahaha), has his term suddenly cut short. Besides Agent Collins, the crime is investigated by shady Chief of Staff Samantha Redmond, whose codename is “Sinatra” (scarily played by Julianne Nicholson), and others whose true motives we only gradually glean.
Paradise plays like Designated Survivor crossed with Silo. Marsden has a lot of fun playing a loosey-goosey president, Brown is very good as the conflicted agent, and Nicholson is riveting as always. What starts as a slow-burn political thriller takes a number of eyebrow-raising twists, and it is great fun to watch it play out.
The series is part political thriller, part near-future speculation and part paranoid conspiracy: a slow-boil whodunit with solid acting and smart writing, delving through flashbacks into the crises embroiling a US president, his stolid Secret Service head, and White House staff who are shadier than the dark lighting in the basement bowels of Paradise.
It has a decidedly ‘80s throwback feel, thanks to President Cal’s CD mixes. Genesis pops up early on in the soundtrack, with Another Day in Paradise inflicted on our ears, followed by several versions of Starship’s We Built This City, Poison’s Every Rose Has Its Thorn, and even some Whitesnake—almost like they raided Patrick Bateman’s CD collection.
It makes you wonder: What if all future civilizations could find sifting through our rubble someday was old Genesis, Starship, and Poison CDs from the ‘80s?
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Paradise is now streaming on Disney+.
