Tag: 250109

Cousins visit Poland in a trip meant to remember their grandmother and reconnect with each other in A Real Pain, a sweet, kind, frequently heartbreaking comedy written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg.

Comedy? I mean, it’s a movie about two grief-stricken men from a Jewish American family, one who has just suffered a mental health crisis, engaging in a Holocaust-centered tour of Poland. But I also laughed out loud at some truly funny, well-observed moments so — comedy like that.

David Kaplan (Eisenberg) is married with a demanding job and a young son but he has cleared his schedule to spend a week in Poland in honor of his recently deceased grandmother, who grew up there and survived Nazi concentration camps during the war before coming to America. He is also there for Benji (Kieran Culkin), his cousin who, even before we know all the particulars, we can feel that David is deeply worried about. Benji is, as he later says, someone who lights up a room with his charm only to later poop all over everything. Almost exactly the same age as David, Benji is clearly bright and exuding a desire for connection at all moments. He is also, it’s strongly implied, directionless, erratic and spends most of his time getting high.

The trip is a structured tour with non-Jewish, British leader James (Will Sharpe) walking through the history and tragedy of Jewish Poland with retired American couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes), whose Jewish family immigrated from Poland decades before the war, and his wife Diane (Liza Sadovy); the recently divorced New Yorker Marcia (a luminous Jennifer Grey), whose mother was a survivor, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism. Benji becomes something of the active ingredient in the tour mix — spurring fun, spurring introspection, causing chaos.

Culkin makes need pour out of Benji just as Eisenberg makes worry and anxiety radiate from David. Benji and David’s relationship, one that was clearly brotherly in their youth, is the warm center of this movie. They love each other intensely, just as they intensely want to smack each other. Everything about it feels genuine, which makes their actions — from their big outbursts to their moments of side-eye — feel real and lived in. When Benji rants at a tour dinner, for example, it doesn’t feel stagey, it feels awkward and sad and the responses by the other tour participants give you a deeper window into each of their characters. Excellent performances all the way around in this short, bittersweet movie that is well worth a watch. A Available for purchase.

Nightbitch (R)

Being a mom to a young son breaks Amy Adams’ brain — relatable — in the light-horror comedy Nightbitch.

Previously a visual artist, Adams’ character, who is just called Mother in IMDb, now spends her days caring for her son, who I think is just called Baby (Arleigh Snowden and Emmett Snowden). He’s sort-of early preschool age — still young enough to injure himself just toddlering through life but old enough to express opinions in words about his food or his unwillingness to go to sleep. Her husband, Scoot McNairy — whose character is called “Husband” — works a job that frequently takes him away on work trips, so not only is she with her son all day but frequently all day and all night, a job she can never clock out of. She loves her son intensely but she would also like to shower more than once a week and laughs with a kind of bitter, gleeful horror at the unflattering things she sees in the mirror: wrinkles, gray hair, facial hair, a patch of fur on her back, longer pointy-er teeth, maybe a tail? As she sort of spirals with her own identity — is she even an artist any more? — she is also sort of fascinated with this other thing she might be turning into, something decidedly more primal, more canine.

Nightbitch, based on the book by Rachel Yoder that is in my to-read pile (and thus I’m judging the movie entirely as its own thing), feels like it is “in conversation,” to quote one of Adams’ snooty art friends, with Tully, the Diablo Cody-penned movie about the brain-altering effects of motherhood. In Tully, Charlize Theron’s mother character is dealing with something like postpartum depression shortly after having a baby. Here, it’s the period when Baby has become just enough of an independent person to give Adams the space to wonder what the hell is happening to herself. She is initially prickly toward a group of moms with similar-aged kids — seeing only their “Wheels on the Bus” exteriors and not the thickets of rage, confusion and wildness that is underneath for them as well. She is also awkward around her former art friends; her kid-talk is silly or sad to them, at least that’s what she’s taking from their reactions. What to do with all of that white-hot frustration? Well, some of it gets thrown at clueless Scoot, who really does an excellent job crafting a character that is both basically a nice guy and also has no idea what his wife is going through. And maybe some of it is magical realism-ing Adams into a dog, a dog whose nighttime activities may or may not be resulting in the bodies of small animals being left at her doorstep.

I think Marielle Heller, who adapted and directed this movie, leaves a lot of the dog stuff for you to do with what you want. Are you watching Adams metaphorically succumb to her more feral instincts or is she a woman actually werewolfing out? “Yes” is a perfectly fine answer to me. And on that level, the alt-reality inner-is-outer level, I think Adams does a good job of finding the darkness and the humor of this very specific slice of the “longest shortest time” to borrow the name of a parenting podcast. She captures the blend of screaming-into-the-void and this-is-the-best-thing-ever really well and gives herself over to its body horror. This is a fun movie that takes its “weird places a mom can go after two glasses of wine” emotions seriously but isn’t self-serious. B+ Streaming on Hulu.

Emilia Pérez (R)

A Mexican cartel boss fakes her death and tries to become a sort of hero of the people while also hiding a secret from her wife and children in the high-drama musical Emilia Pérez, the winner of four awards at the recent Golden Globes.

Karla Sofía Gascón plays the titular character who begins the story living as Juan Manitas del Monte, the cartel boss whose violent crime-world life won’t allow for living as her true female self. She feels her only way to transition fully and live publicly as a woman is to “kill” Manitas — and even convince her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and two sons of this death. I’ve read criticisms by trans writers about how all of this is presented and how the movie treats both her gender-affirming surgery and her relationship to her family. These criticisms seem fair (as do criticisms of the cartoonish way Mexico is presented) and it feels worthwhile to consider the issues people have with this movie, especially for its handling of a trans character (who is played by a trans actress). The movie (and its whole awards deal) can feel a little like it’s patting itself on the back without seeing some of its problems.

I also don’t find this movie to be particularly grounded in reality on any level, and not just because lawyer Zoe Saldaña occasionally breaks into song. Rita Mora Castro (Saldaña, who won one of those Globes) is a talented lawyer in Mexico who sings that her gender and her skin color make it hard for her to live her ambitions. Because Manitas could see Rita’s talent propping up her empty-suit boss, Manitas hires (after first kidnapping) Rita to manage all the legalities of her transition, from moving money around to set Jessi and the boys up for a comfortable life in Switzerland to finding a doctor willing to do what appears to be full body surgery all at once in semi-secret. After cashing the check for that service and building a new life in London, Rita is scared when she realizes the Mexican woman she seems to just run into at a dinner party four years later is Emilia. Are you here to tie up loose ends, Rita sings. Emilia clarifies that her plan is not murder but getting her sons back. She wants to pose as a long-lost cousin of Manitas who Jessi and the boys will move in with back in Mexico.

Which they do? Despite Jessi not really wanting to? And meanwhile Emilia becomes a sort of patron saint of families who are looking for missing loved ones? She uses Manitas’ old criminal contacts to find out — consequence-free I guess? or why would they help her? — where victims have been buried to give people closure. The big public splash she makes for the cause would seem to be at odds with her fear of being “found out” but like I said, this isn’t a movie that’s grounded in any kind of realism.

Here’s the thing, though, in spite of all the “really?” story beats and questionable choices, I can’t entirely discount this movie. It’s sort of a dizzy, colorful, tragic fantasy story — very primary colors in its opinions and not all that thoughtful about its three female characters (joined in the third act by Adriana Paz as an abused wife delighted to learn that she is in fact a widow who then becomes the girlfriend of Emilia). It’s kind of a mess and kind of fascinating and features a definitely interesting performance from Gascón, more for what she’s doing than for the words on the page, and a big-swing performance by Saldaña. B- Streaming on Netflix.

Featured Image: A Real Pain