Tag Archives: Jesse Eisenberg

A Real Pain

A Real Pain is a sweet little movie about two cousins who travel to Poland together via funding from their late grandmother. On the trip they explore grandma’s homeland, their Jewishness and their relationships with one another.

David is played by Jesse Eisenberg who wrote and directed the film. He’s the straight arrow, married with a kid, working in marketing in NYC. He has anxiety but controls it with meds.

Cousin Benji is the title character, played by Kieran Culkin. He’s a mess. One might easily conclude that he is “on the spectrum,” based on his erratic behavior and his responses to certain elements of their trek.

Shortly after they arrive in Warsaw, they meet up with their entourage including recent divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey!) who Benji pals up with, though not in a romantic way. There’s also an older couple from Cleveland. And, interestingly, a black man from Wisconsin, who escaped genocide in his native African land and became interested in Judaism from a support group in the U.S.

The tour leader is an Englishman who narrates the group’s visits to a war memorial, a cemetery and a concentration camp. David and Benji break off from the group to see the place where grandma lived.

The film’s soundtrack is primarily Chopin piano pieces which, like anything that’s overdone, become tedious after a while. Of course, it’s entirely appropriate to use his music as he is a Polish icon. Heck, the Warsaw airport is named for him!

Benji lives in Binghamton so he and David haven’t spent much time together recently. Their interactions with each another and with the travel group are often uncomfortable as the cousins revisit their family histories and try to understand each other’s current life situations.

For fans of Kieran Culkin’s work on the recent series Succession, A Real Pain is a must-see. His performance is the spice that gives the story some necessary conflict and helps showcase his range as an actor. Some folks have suggested that his work here may even be award-worthy. TBD.

A Real Pain clocks in at just under 90 minutes. It is rated R for language and drug use, mainly weed. 

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Now You See Me

Now You See Me presents illusion on a grand scale. Not only the outsize magic tricks, but the characters and the plot points, too, are not always what they seem to be. The result is a vastly entertaining movie.

At the movie’s start, four magicians are introduced in brief vignettes: Daniel (Jesse Eisenberg), Merritt (Woody Harrelson), Henley (Isla Fisher) and Jack (Dave Franco). After demonstrating their talents, each gets a mysterious card inviting them to a meeting that results in their forming a team.

The Four Horsemen, as they call themselves, begin with a true WTF? illusion in which they rob a bank in Paris from their Las Vegas stage. Hard to explain the depth of the illusion here, but it’s a mind-blower. (The audience volunteer for this trick looks, on first glance, to be a very big star in a cameo. Whoa! But, no, it’s not actually Robert Downey Junior, just a guy who looks a bit like him.)

When the Paris bank finds that their Euros have gone poof, FBI agent Dylan (Mark Ruffalo) and Interpol agent Alma (Mélanie Laurent) question the four, but release them. Also entering the story is Thaddeus Bradley (played by Morgan Freeman), a former magician who has made a career debunking and exposing other magicians’ tricks via a line of successful videos. Michael Caine appears as the Four Horsemen’s manager/advisor/benefactor.

As the fast-moving storyline progresses, the main question to be answered is who assembled these four and what is this person’s motivation? Following a trick/stunt in New Orleans that includes the apparent criminal theft of more money, our gang of four retreats to New York. As authorities close in, they run. Magician Jack is pursued in an exciting chase through Manhattan traffic that results in a fiery crash on the 59th Street Bridge. Jack’s apparent demise leaves no one feelin’ groovy.

After the Four Horsemen’s penultimate bit of business atop an NYC rooftop, all is explained and the elaborate, tangled web is unraveled.

With some films, you might hope to get to know the characters better, but with Now You See Me, it’s the plot that keeps the wheels turning. Mere surface awareness of the film’s individuals turns out to be for the best, I believe. Because, as Eisenberg’s character Daniel says at the movie’s beginning, “The closer you look, the less you see.”

(Rated PG-13.)

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