40/31
David Kaplan: Yes
Story
Mismatched cousins reunite for a trip to Poland to honor their beloved grandmother, but old tensions resurface as their family history unravels. When Benji and David visit their grandmother’s home in Poland, Jesse Eisenberg’s 39-year-old real-life ancestors settled in the diaspora… Benji Kaplan: We stay mobile, we stay light, we stay agile. Benji Kaplan: The conductor comes over, we take tickets, we tell him we’re going to the bathroom. David Kaplan: Bathroom. Benji Kaplan: He gets in the back of the train, heads for the front, looking for vagrants. David Kaplan: Excuse me, are we the vagrants?
Benji Kaplan: Yes
By the time he gets to the front, the train will be at the station, and we’ll be free to go home. David Kaplan: That’s fucking stupid. Tickets are probably like twelve dollars. Benji Kaplan: That’s the principle of it. We shouldn’t have to pay for train tickets in Poland. This is our country. David Kaplan: No, this was our country.
Appears in CBS News Sunday Morning: Episode 4644 (2024)
They fired us because they thought we were cheap. 12 Etudes, Op. 25, No. 3 in F Major Written by Frederic Chopin Performed by Tzvi Erez. Jesse Eisenberg’s second attempt as a writer-director is set to do something unconventional. There’s something of Richard Linklater’s BEFORE trilogy in the DNA of A REAL PAIN, and some recognizable heritage from Michael Winterbottom’s TRIP series is also evident. The perambulating pacing, the languid cinematography that begs you to look beneath the surface of the tourist attractions, the dialogue that meanders through a modest and unstructured exposition of the meaning of life, the complete absence of “bad guys”; the almost complete absence of direct conflict, the faintest hint of a purpose driving the plot beyond the completion of a simple road map…
it doesn’t quite work
True Grit shares all of these realistic traits with the earlier, more buoyant, life-affirming films. Yet somehow… I don’t know what was wrong with why I didn’t really get into this film. I think a lot of it has to do with all the supporting characters (that is, everyone except the cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin). Will Sharpe’s non-Jewish tour guide, the Rwandan proselytizer, the old couple, the sexy divorcee… the characters are all very simple, very conventional, very boring. The actors who play them are okay, but they don’t have much to do, so they seem unnatural and lifeless, more like props than people.
But maybe he doesn’t know how to direct actors, or maybe he just doesn’t know how to write characters
I think Eisenberg knows how to direct a camera; he knows how to put the right cinematic elements in place. There’s never any indication that these people exist beyond the moments we see them in, which could have been improved by more spontaneous improvisation from the actors. Eisenberg and especially Culkin are better in this regard, but there’s still something rather crude and “written” about a lot of what they say and do. Eisenberg’s “workaholic, OCD salesman” is largely one-dimensional, and the few times his character expands beyond that facade feel more like forced acting than any real glimpse into anything deeper. Culkin is wonderful—perhaps a glimpse of his successor’s character, if Roman Roy really cared about people—but I think that’s just down to Culkin’s talent; he somehow manages to transcend what he’s given to work with. It’s a decent independent film with a few good laughs, some interesting ideas, a memorable tour of Poland, and a solid performance from Culkin.