In our bleak current moment, as we brace for the return of a POTUS who already plans to pardon himself and anyone else who committed crimes to his benefit, it is permissible to give into shock for a while. Sure, there were warning signs in preceding months… but it’s something else to know your fellow citizens have rubber-stamped what is sure to be a drastic weakening of our essential democratic institutions. While starting to stoke energy for a grim fight over the next four years (at least), you’re allowed to seek comfort where you can find it. So it seems particularly good timing to greet something like A Real Pain, a small oasis of empathy, compassion, learning from history, and other qualities we’ll doubtless soon be regarding with mournful nostalgia.
This is the second feature as writer-director for actor Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network, Zombieland), who did not act in the first—When You Finish Saving the World, an astute seriocomedy about a humorlessly virtuous Manhattan mother and her exasperatingly slackerish teen son, a quarrelsome pair too self-absorbed to realize they’re actually very much alike. Pain also feels rather like a New Yorker short story (something its creator has actually written, along with a few stage plays), an unassuming character miniature that achieves a certain universality without being lofty or obvious about it. But World was a good film; this is a great one, or at least it’s great for our problematic point in time.
David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins who, having been very close when younger, happily reunite to go on a trip. Their beloved late grandmother specifically willed funds so they could see Poland, the homeland she’d been forced to flee during Nazi occupation.
Growing up, Benji was the charismatic, adventurous kid who pried David out of his shell. But now the dynamic is somewhat different. While David is still a tad neurotic and cautious by nature, he lives in Manhattan with a wife, child, and “real” job, even if his anti-capitalist cuz sneers at the latter. Benji, by contrast, is a failure at “adulting.” He’s full of self-righteous criticism about how other, supposedly more conformist or hypocritical people live their lives… but he can’t seem to maintain employment, a relationship, or do much of anything beyond smoking dope under his parents’ roof. We eventually grasp that he has recently tried to take his life.
That fact acutely grieves and worries David, even as Benji’s old bravado seems present and accounted for in his surface behavior. He exerts a pushy charm on the others in their small package-tour group, all fairly well-off American Jews seeking family or spiritual heritage: A newly retired couple (Liza Savody, Daniel Oreskes), a recent divorcee (Jennifer Grey), and a refugee from Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan). They’re a pleasant, courteous lot, attentive to the knowledge imparted by their Oxford history scholar guide (Will Sharpe). Yet as the trip goes on, Benji escalates from micro-aggressions towards David to antagonizing others, as if he were on some higher moral plane than these bourgeoise tourists. It’s clearly coming out of insecurity, but often in rude, childish-tantrum ways.
Much of this road movie—which begins and ends at the airport, entirely confined to the tour dates—is funny in a discomfiting comedy-of-human-foibles way not distant from the works of Noam Baumbach and Woody Allen, directors Eisenberg has worked for. But when the group reaches the crux of its journey through a largely-erased Jewish past, spending a day at a preserved Nazi concentration camp, the film abandons all mirth. It is not, however, hand-wringing—this sequence is notably without music, in a feature otherwise infused throughout by Chopin piano etudes—and the brisk matter-of-factness with which it’s treated packs more punch than just about any highly dramatic depiction you could imagine.
After that, tensions between Benji and everyone else briefly flare into a bonfire. He’s really at war with himself, battling demons he can’t or won’t articulate. It’s up to David to address them in a couple potent speeches, in one lamenting that his cousin is enviably capable of “lighting up a room,” then feels compelled to “shit on everything in it.”
A Real Pain—a title that has multiple levels, since Benji is both a pain and in pain—has that rare screen virtue these days of being almost too short, at 89 minutes. We’re not ready to leave most of its characters behind when the cousins do a last stretch of their trip alone. Everything is so succinct yet unforced here, you might almost resent Eisenberg his exactitude of craft. But the film ends as well as any has this year, on what might be the kind of closing narrative note I like best: A silent shot that confirms what we’ve already suspected while adding new intel, crystallized by a shiver of private pathos in public space. It’s a perfect fadeout for a movie that itself is just about perfect. A Real Pain opens nationwide this Fri/15.
Another actor turned writer-director who’s an astute observer of character minutae is Andrea Arnold, whose first two features behind the camera (the Glasgow-set 2006 Red Road, 2009’s East London tale Fish Tank) were acclaimed, unflinching slices of messy working-class lives. However, her subsequent version of Wuthering Heights, the improv-driven American Honey, and farm life documentary Cow were all experiments that struck me as more “interesting” than rewarding. Despite some well-received TV work, she hasn’t seemed fully back in her creative comfort zone until the new Bird, which opens at the Roxie this Fri/15.
Like Fish Tank, it is about an underage girl rendered combative by harsh environs and neglectful-to-null parenting. 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is a biracial kid living in a northern Kent squat with her tattoo-covered father (Barry Keoghan) and his girlfriend (Frankie Box). The latter duo are getting married, which does not especially thrill Bailey. Refusing to wear an awesomely tacky outfit bought for that occasion, getting an androgynous haircut to boot in protest, she semi-runs away—not that anyone here is likely to notice.
Traipsing around the bleak surrounding countryside, she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a strange, friendly, trusting foreign wanderer looking for traces of the parents who lost or gave him up in childhood. Bailey at first treats him with automatic suspicion and hostility. His guilelessness touches something in her, though, so that they become odd-couple friends helping one another. It might be the first significant exposure she’s had to adult kindness—when we meet her mother (Jasmine Jobson), who lives in a separate squat with Bailey’s younger step-sisters, it is clear that lady has not done much to compensate for the father’s hot-mess disarray.
This is no “green and pleasant land” but a dirty and poor one, a bleak vision of post-Brexit England wherein substantial swaths of the population no longer hold the faintest hope of betterment. As usual, Arnold gets excellent performances from the nonprofessional actors in her cast. You might mistake Keoghan for one of them, he’s so convincing in a role whose snug fit provides a rebound from Saltburn, where he seemed all wrong. Rogowski is another invaluable resource who can be misused, his innate peculiarity at risk of becoming a sort of special effect. His soulfulness is well-deployed here. Yet the magical-realist direction this character ultimately takes the film in seems another instance of Arnold reaching for something that lies outside her highly evolved if narrow skill set.
Bird isn’t as good as her best (that remains Fish Tank), but it is still a return to form. For every moment that seems digressively improv-indulgent or just bizarre, there are others that seem spot-on. And there’s at least one great sequence, with Keoghan leading a caterwauling karaoke “Yellow” in one of cinema’s all-time skankiest party scenes. Coldplay fans will be amused, Coldplay haters absolutely delighted. Please, Andrea Arnold: Do Oasis next!
Back in the real world of con-men rather than bird-men, the pervasive question of the hour “How did we get here and where the hell are we headed?” finds some answers in documentaries of recent vintage.
Rick Goldsmith’s Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink offers a sobering overview of how “vulture capitalism” has reduced US news media—which had already been embattled by the internet and other factors for years—to a rapidly-shrinking, monopolistic shell of itself. It methodically explains how the decimation of independent local newspapers, the increasing dominance of corporate owners with no real stake in reportorial integrity, et al. led to…well, you know what, with disinformation, paranoia and propaganda turning voters against their own best interests. We wrote more extensively about the film when it played the United Nations Film Fest last year. It plays Oakland’s New Parkway next Tues/19 only, with the Berkeley-based director in person.
A glimpse of our deregulatory immediate future might be had in another nonfiction feature. William Hart’s Lead and Copper is the story of the infamous Flint water crisis, which provided one educational illustration of what happens when an “entrepreneurial” GOP governor seeks to cut costs—preferably at the expense of citizens he doesn’t care about (and who don’t vote for him) anyway. Largely poor, largely Black Flint, a former General Motors factory town fallen on hard times, found its astronomically expensive water supply taking an abrupt turn for the worse after Gov. Rick Snyder appointed “emergency managers” whose authority overrode all local officials.
Residents were told newly discolored or otherwise suspicious tap water was nonetheless “safe,” though it turned out they were being blatantly lied to—everyone around Snyder knew otherwise. (Questioned about his own dubious ignorance, he has the stupefying gall to object to the questioner’s lack of “civility.”) This wasn’t just a matter of an “off taste.” Blood poisoning, anemia, loss of hair, and developmental harm to children’s nervous systems were among the impacts. The denialism went all the way up the food chain to the EPA.
Why? Well, as one observer here puts it, “There’s a definite sense of people being expendable in this country, and it usually runs along racial lines. And when it gets outside racial lines, it’s along economic lines.” Simply put, the citizens of Flint didn’t matter to those who could pinch a few pennies at the expense of their well-being, political operatives who can fib under oath without breaking a sweat. How many communities may find themselves in similar circumstances in coming years? Don’t think “It can’t happen here”: At this film’s end, there is a very long list of county water systems with current lead-content exceedances—and it includes Alameda, Marin, and Sonoma. Lead and Copper releases to digital and VOD streaming platforms Tues/19.
