Old Yorker

  • A Real Pain

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Jesse Eisenberg (2024)

    Most English-language pictures of the last year have been so ropy there’s a risk of overrating one that bucks the trend.  But A Real Pain – well written, directed and acted (and, at ninety minutes, on the short side) – is a good film.  Thinking about the Holocaust victims and survivors among his own Ashkenazi ancestors led Jesse Eisenberg to devise this story of two present-day Jewish Americans – David Kaplan (Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) – on an organised ‘Holocaust tour’ of Poland.  They’re the same age; as kids, they were ‘joined at the hip’.  As adults, they’ve gone their separate ways.  Their short trip to Poland – to honour the memory of their late, much-loved grandmother – is in effect a reunion.

    The cousins are conceived as chalk and cheese.  David, married with a young son, lives and works, selling digital ads, in New York City.  Jobless Benji lives alone in upstate Binghamton:  his main occupation seems to be getting hold of and smoking weed.  En route to JFK, tense, schedule-driven David leaves half a dozen voicemails on Benji’s phone detailing his rate of progress to the airport.  When he arrives, he’s amazed to learn that Benji has already been at JFK a couple of hours though their flight’s not due to leave for a couple of hours more.  Different as they are, he and David have similar speech patterns:  both talk fast, as if in competition.  It takes a while to adjust to this and you may find the rat-a-tat delivery getting on your nerves, Benji’s especially.  This isn’t unintentional on Jesse Eisenberg’s part:  Benji also gets on David’s nerves; once they’re in Poland, his motormouth candour tries the patience of others in the small tour party.  Yet Benji engages his travelling companions – and us – too.  Eisenberg’s script neatly justifies the pair getting back together:  their grandmother, who died recently, left money in her will for them to make the Polish trip.  David and Benji have arranged in advance to leave the rest of the party before the tour’s end to spend an extra night in Lublin and, next day, visit the house there that was once Grandma Dory’s home.  This is neat too, as a means of ensuring they’re left to themselves at the business end of the story.

    There are seven tourists all told, five of them ethnically Jewish.  The other three Jews are all Americans a generation older than fortyish David and Benji – Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a recently divorced ‘lady who lunches’, and retired married couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Paul (Daniel Oreskes).  The party is completed by English tour guide James (Will Sharpe), an Oxford graduate in East European studies, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who came to the US as a child refugee and subsequently converted to Judaism.  All five contribute a good deal to A Real Pain.  The exchanges involving them, like those between David and Benji, include a mixture of funny, poignant and awkward moments.  Eisenberg orchestrates these well-cast actors beautifully:  their playing is at just the right level and Will Sharpe is especially good.  When James first speaks, his unprepossessing looks and Yorkshire accent seem to promise a cartoon anorak; as the story goes on, James becomes much more.  After Benji has a go at the tour guide – ‘like, the constant barrage of stats is kinda making this trip a little cold … we’ve just been going from one touristy thing to another, not meeting anyone who’s actually Polish!’ – James is winded.  He’s as genial as ever but even less comfortable than before, always seeming to check what he’s saying it as he says it.

    Not everyone is always so anxious to accommodate Benji’s outbursts.  On the railway journey to Lublin, he rails against the ‘irony’ that the party is ‘eating this fancy food – sitting up here when eighty years ago we would have been herded into the backs of these things like fuckin’ cattle’.  He gets up and heads for the rear of the train:  ‘I don’t think you’ll find much suffering back there either,’ observes Mark.  For the most part, though, A Real Pain gets a lot of mileage from the rest of the group preferring to keep things polite, however infuriating Benji is.  Eisenberg pushes this rather too far when, on the same train journey, the Kaplans miss their stop and take a fare-dodging ride (which terrifies David) back in the direction whence they came, to find the tour group waiting uncomplainingly for them at Lublin station.  Benji reveals himself as nostalgic for childhood, when David, ‘anxious and adorable’, was always crying.  Now, Benji complains, he never shows any emotion at all.  David, who sees this as part of being the grown-up that his cousin clearly isn’t, is increasingly embarrassed by loose-cannon Benji.  He seems always to be apologising for him.

    Jesse Eisenberg originally intended to play Benji, which is undoubtedly the film’s star turn.  Benji has as much screen time as David and the actor playing Benji a lot more opportunities to make a big impression.  While he and Benji tell each other things in the hotel rooms they share throughout, David, in the company of the rest of the party, opens up just once – and suddenly, during dinner at a Lublin restaurant.  Benji, in another fury, has gone to the bathroom.  While he’s away from the table, David tells the others how he feels about himself and about his cousin, and reveals that, six months ago, Benji attempted suicide.  The speech may seem a bit much but Eisenberg cannily disarms criticism with David’s closing line – ‘Sorry, I’m oversharing’.  The next second, Benji is back in the limelight.  He wasn’t the only one exasperated by the restaurant pianist’s cheesy choice of ‘Hava Nagila’ to serenade diners.  Now Benji has somehow taken over the piano, playing ‘Tea for Two’.  These are the only musical interruptions to the Chopin pieces that Eisenberg uses throughout A Real Pain.  Chopin is a good choice – Polish, obviously, and the music is affecting, although it isn’t there to cue particular emotional effects.  There’s no music on the soundtrack when the tourists visit the Majdanek camp.  This doesn’t come over as falsely reverential:  Eisenberg has used the Chopin sparingly enough to avoid that impression.

    Kieran Culkin certainly makes the most of the generous gift he’s given.  Benji has the lion’s share of the best one-liners – such as his response, when Marsha laments that her daughter has married a rich man and no longer seems capable of intelligent conversation, that ‘Money’s like fuckin’ heroin for boring people’.  Benji finds other things boring, too – David’s line of work, for example – and his capacity for being bored has a lot to do with the deficits of his own life.  The more volatile and unreasonable he becomes, the more Culkin makes clear that, as his companions also realise, Benji is ‘in pain’.  He has a personal charm, though, that David envies.  When the pair take their leave of the others, James tells Benji, ‘I’ve been doing these tours for five years and you’re the first person to give me any actionable feedback’.  Benji doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about – he was probably off his head when he savaged James earlier – but embraces him.  David looks on; all he gets from James is a ‘bye, David’.  It’s no surprise that Kieran Culkin, rather than Jesse Eisenberg, is getting acting prizes in the current awards season but Eisenberg’s achievement in portraying David shouldn’t be underestimated.  He brings off something difficult:  he makes David charmless, without being in the least dislikable.

    Eisenberg’s screenplay is attracting awards attention.  This is well-deserved not just because the script includes plenty of sharp, smart dialogue but also because it dares to be anti-climactic and unresolved.  Lublin cemetery contains what’s thought to be the oldest grave in Poland, that of Jacob Levi Kopleman – ‘a real Polish person – from Poland’, James nervously stresses before suggesting that the group follow Jewish tradition by placing stones on the tombstone to show ‘you are not forgotten’.  When the cousins visit Grandma Dory’s former house, David follows suit outside what was her front door.  A Polish man who lives nearby complains that the stones are a trip hazard.  David and Benji sheepishly remove them.  That’s the end of the scene and virtually the end of the trip.  Eisenberg gives the visit to Poland real meaning for David and Benji without this eclipsing the importance of their own relationship – but that, too, is unresolved.  There isn’t a detailed explanation of Benji’s unhappiness or a decisive emotional breakthrough at the end of their week together.  Even though, when they land, David invites Benji to come back home with him for dinner, the two part, as they met, at JFK airport.  David returns to his wife (Ellora Torchia) and son (Jesse Eisenberg’s own son, Banner).  Benji says he’ll hang around in the airport for a bit – ‘I kinda like it here.  You meet the craziest people’.  At the end of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009), the George Clooney protagonist gazed, puzzled and desolate, at an airport departures board.  Like Up in the Air, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is very talkative but it too concludes with a wordless and wondrous close-up on a man’s face.  Benji sits on an airport bench, looking around him.  He’s smiling, as if among friends, yet the effect is terribly sad.  Kieran Culkin has a ball with his splendid lines in A Real Pain but his last, silent moment is the best moment of all.

    15 January 2025

  • Babygirl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Halina Reijn (2024)

    Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman) is CEO of Tensile, a successful AI company in New York City.  She’s been married for nineteen years to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director; they have two teenage daughters (Esther McGregor and Vaughan Reilly).  The first sound heard in writer-director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl – a sound that precedes the first image on the screen – is Romy’s moans.  She and Jacob are having sex; once it’s done, Romy gets up from their bed and walks into a nearby room.  Lying on the floor there, she turns on a laptop then herself by watching a porn film:  we can see and hear that this is more exciting to her than the session with Jacob was.  In a company promo Romy announces that the increasing power of artificial intelligence in the workplace makes ‘emotional intelligence in leadership’ even more important.  It’s not long before she’s signally failing to deliver on that front:  she finds herself in a sexual relationship with Samuel (Harris Dickinson), one of the latest crop of Tensile interns.

    Romy first sees him in the street outside the company offices.  Another man’s dog has got loose and, barking mad, heads straight for Romy.  Samuel calms the large black animal down quickly – it seems to Romy miraculously – and returns it to an apologetic owner.  Back in the marital bedroom, Romy tells Jacob she wants him to make love to her while she watches porn; he doesn’t seem keen so she tries something else (presumably) new, covering her head with a sheet while Jacob goes about his business.  He soon stops, telling Romy with an embarrassed laugh that what she’s doing makes him feel ‘like a villain’.  Jacob is currently directing a production of Hedda Gabler so it’s good news that Halina Reijn’s movie doesn’t conclude with her heroine committing suicide.  The story’s timeframe is only a few weeks – at any rate, there are Christmas trees in evidence almost throughout.  Romy’s affair with Samuel causes a crisis in her marriage but she and Jacob patch things up; Samuel, who (speedily) moves to a job somewhere in Japan, is gone but not forgotten.  The less good news about Babygirl is that it ends with Romy, in bed with Jacob, fantasising about Samuel and that black dog – a fantasy that yields her first-ever orgasm during sex with her husband.

    The film is very well acted by all three principals.  And, though this is damning with faint praise, it’s a relatively nuanced exploration of gender power relationships in the workplace – relative, that is, to recent movies like the fictional The Assistant (2019) or the fact-based Bombshell (2019), which also featured Nicole Kidman.  Yet Babygirl is essentially rather silly.  The who’s-exploiting-who dynamic of Romy and Samuel’s relationship is superficially compelling but this is really the story of one woman’s particular sexual needs – which don’t connect interestingly to her exceptionally successful professional life.  Reijn doesn’t, besides, make it convincing that Romy expresses these needs at work – even though the opening verbal exchanges between her and Samuel there are convincing, and funny.  When the new interns are introduced, as a group, to Romy, Samuel stands out by asking a tricky question; at this point Romy’s assistant, Esme (Sophie Wilde), hurriedly draws the meeting to a close before recommending Tensile’s mentoring scheme to the newcomers.  Romy bumps into Samuel again in the office refreshments area and asks him to get her a coffee – which he does, though not without letting her know caffeine’s bad for you late in the working day.  When she asks how he pacified the dog in the street, Samuel says he gave it a cookie; when she then asks if he always has cookies about his person, he admits with a chuckle that he does, adding, ‘Why, d’you want one?’  Next time their paths cross, he tells Romy he’s chosen her as his mentor.

    It’s here that Babygirl starts to wobble.  Romy tells Samuel she’s not part of the mentoring scheme; he refers to a list of names he’s received that shows otherwise.  Although Reijn doesn’t give much detail on the size of organisation that Tensile is, the idea of a CEO mentoring interns seems surprising – and it clearly comes as unwelcome news to Romy.  Yet she simply accepts what Samuel says, and she doesn’t query things with Esme, who presumably circulated the list of available mentors.  The rationale for Romy’s accepting Samuel as a mentee surely isn’t that she’s already smitten so likes the idea of seeing as much of him as possible.  In the film’s later stages, apparently unassuming Esme will instruct her boss to promote her in exchange for silence about the affair with Samuel; but we can’t be meant to infer that Esme engineered the mentoring relationship on the off chance that Romy would fall into the trap of getting romantically involved with Samuel.  There’s no good reason, in other words, for Romy to agree to mentor – except that Reijn is dependent on this to get the affair underway.

    At the first mentoring session, Samuel wastes no time.  He propositions Romy.  She protests briefly before kissing him.  The die is cast.  Whereas Samuel knows he now has the upper hand, Romy isn’t so quick on the uptake.  When they rendezvous in a hotel room, she frets that she may be exploiting Samuel because she’s a boss and he’s an intern and because of the large age difference between them; he matter-of-factly replies that he could get her fired ‘with one phone call’.  What’s more, when she vainly tries to assert her authority, he tells her she wants to be told what to do:  he can read her like a book.  A few ‘highlights’ from the trysts that follow … Samuel orders Romy to get down on all fours and she obeys, without even getting a cookie.  Another time, she takes up the same position and drinks from the saucer of milk Samuel has placed on the floor (they seem to be getting dogs and cats mixed up at this point).  He asks if she wants to take her clothes off; when she says no, he says, ‘But you will, won’t you?’ and she does – he, fully clothed, appraises her nakedness.  Samuel shows Romy tenderness – telling her how beautiful she is, calling her ‘babygirl’ as he holds her – and there’s shared intimacy between them but he’s always in charge.

    If the scenario involved a male CEO and a female intern, an intelligent film audience nowadays would see him as thoroughly reprehensible, however blatantly she gave him the come-on and whatever she then made him do.  Although the role of Samuel is probably underwritten, Harris Dickinson helps Reijn to exploit the relative ambiguity of the female boss-male underling set-up.  Dickinson is unassertively charming; he makes Samuel sensitive but not greatly vulnerable.  He sometimes does it tentatively but this young man is always trying to see what he can get away with.  But Reijn – presumably to underline that Romy’s position is less powerful than might be supposed – makes her too readily exploitable.  If she’s so sexually dissatisfied and hungry, how come she kept going with Jacob for nearly two decades without mentioning something?  She clearly hasn’t told Jacob before if his puzzled then hurt reactions to what now happens are to be believed.  As interpreted by Nicole Kidman, Romy is not a woman asserting herself professionally as a means of compensating for mute submission in the domestic sphere.  Babygirl would be more plausible if she explored getting what’s missing in her marital sex life in ways that didn’t complicate her working life.

    Tensile is a good name for a company headed by Nicole Kidman, whose Romy is hyper-sensitised to a degree:  you’re surprised Jacob and Samuel don’t get an electric shock touching her.  Kidman shows enormous technical skill – and is reasonably being praised for a ‘fearless’ performance – yet her role, for all that it’s a showcase for her talents,  feels demeaning, too.  The same goes, in a lesser way, for Antonio Banderas.  His emotionally truthful playing lends Jacob Mathis a credibility that the writing of the character doesn’t deserve:  Jacob’s culturally tony line of work enables Romy to appear at, then disappear from, a first-night backstage party; otherwise, Jacob might as well be a chartered accountant.  A subplot involving the love life of the Mathises’ lesbian elder daughter is no more than filler.

    In Babygirl’s penultimate scene, a male executive at the company – a man older than Romy – parks himself in her office, asks if she arranged for Samuel to head for Japan and invites her to his own house the following week when ‘I’ll have the place to myself’.  Romy tells the creep she’s not afraid of him and to get out.  You want to cheer her bold response – though it’s not clear, given how many people appear to know what went on between her and Samuel, why her anxiety to keep it secret has suddenly vanished.  This sequence seems to be inserted to show that normal service in contemporary screen depictions of the workplace has been resumed:  men are sleazeballs, women offer feisty resistance.  By now, though, it’s hard not to think Halina Reijn was less interested in exploring the complexities of Romy’s world than in crafting an ‘erotic’ thriller – an order of priorities that’s strikingly reflected, incidentally, in reviews of her film.  Plenty of critics are judging Babygirl‘s success primarily according to how steamy (or steamless) they found it.

    12 January 2025

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