If humanity were to one day be forced to welcome a celebrity overlord, it could do worse than the tuxedoed visage of Jesse Eisenberg.
At least so the scene at the New York Film Festival this weekend suggested, where on Sunday an unsettlingly large Eisenberg — Zooming in from Budapest — hovered literally and figuratively over the proceedings.
“Please telI me you’re in costume,” said actor Kieran Culkin, gazing upon the looming human penguin.
“Yeah, this is my costume. The last time I wore a tuxedo on my own was a bar mitzvah,” Eisenberg mused. (The filmmaker was wardrobed up for a day of shooting his new Now You See Me movie.)
The occasion of the NYFF gathering was Searchlight’s premiere of A Real Pain, Eisenberg’s Sundance sensation (he wrote, directed and stars) with designs on awards and audiences when it arrives in theaters Nov 1.
The film centers on cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) as they take a roots trip to Poland to visit Holocaust sites and pay homage to their recently departed grandmother, a survivor who immigrated to the United States. A meditation on personal grief and historical tragedy wrapped in the garb of an odd-couple comedy, the film ensures that complex questions of identity and responsibility land with all the laughs.
“I think I probably have a depressive’s worldview, maybe, probably,” Eisenberg said. “And yet I like making jokes more than anything. So the movie really is in some ways a kind of push and pull between something that’s absurd and hilarious and also representative of a kind of grief about the world, a grief about modernity.”
The story had an unusual origin. “I saw an advertisement on the Internet and it said ‘Auschwitz Tours (With Lunch).’ That’s seemed like something to write about,” Eisenberg recalled. “The implications are that we want, as a modern middle-class culture, to go and experience the trauma of our ancestors but at the same time we don’t want to forgo any of our material creature-comfort pleasures.”
He paused.
“And now that I said [Auschwitz With Lunch] and your phone picked it up you’re going to see advertisements for it,” he told the NYFF audience.
Shot before October 7 and the wave of global anti-semitic incidents it unleashed, the film nonetheless arrives a year later with uncanny timing, implicitly asking how one grapples with a historic trauma whose causes have not been eliminated. Nor does the film contain itself to the pain of one group.
“I feel like it’s a lot about connection to one’s familial roots…and the amount of loneliness and suffering that we all are holding all the time,” said Jennifer Grey, who plays a divorcee on the tour with Benji and David. “And not just the painful struggle of a grief-stricken person getting through but how we’re also resilient and goofy and all those things that can exist at the same time.”
Eisenberg added, “I realized that you can do a Holocaust story fraught with all the horrors and grief of the Holocaust but if you make it about real people going through really their own personal grief and strife you can have something that can exist in that careful tone without being too irreverent.”
A Real Pain marks the second consecutive year Holocaust concentration camps are viewed through an unorthodox on-screen lens, after 2023’s The Zone of Interest focused on Nazis living next door. Much of the new movie’s power comes from Culkin’s Benji, a filterless character who’s both provocative and vulnerable — a kind of conscience id — and his comedic friction with Eisenberg’s strait-laced David. Their repartee, apparently, did not end at wrap.
Eisenberg said, “You know you always hear those stories about those Hollywood lech directors who fall in love with their actresses? I was feeling that [for Culkin]. He’s so funny and so charming and so depressed and so witty and also light and dark at the same time.”
Culkin added, “You actually did tell me on set that thing about how people fall in love with their actresses.” (Pause.) “You said that about three feet from me while sweating. How am I supposed to react to that? ‘Go away now?’”
“Yeah. I think that’s how you reacted. I mean you could have just been like, ‘cool, thanks.’ Or ‘hey, I like working with you too.’” (Pause) “You still can,” Eisenberg responded.
Culkin then said, “I’ll work my way to it.”
