The title of Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” a sharp, funny and moving highlight of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, is an inspired play on words. At first it would seem to refer, unambiguously, to Benji (Kieran Culkin), a gregarious, tortured, unfiltered loudmouth who often annoys his milder-mannered cousin David (Eisenberg) as they travel through Poland with a tour group. As these two men retrace their Jewish ancestral footsteps, visiting cemeteries, war memorials, and finally the Majdanek concentration camp, the second meaning of the title emerges: In the face of these horrors, can any of them (even Benji with his irritating hell) really claim to have experienced real pain? After having tasted world historical tragedy, do they have the right to complain about anything?
The question may be beside the point, since Benji and David hardly need permission to complain about (and often about) each other. Theirs is a familiar and conflicted buddy-comedy dynamic, with Eisenberg playing the straight man exasperated by Culkin's volatile post-“Succession” comic fireworks. But Eisenberg, in a big step forward from his 2022 writer-director debut, “When You're Done Saving the World,” doesn't throw artificial obstacles in the path of his characters or force them into a tearful reconciliation. Over the course of 90 brisk, deceptively light minutes, he bases the comedy on an exquisite understanding of character, an ear for Chopin and an eye for the beauty of Polish towns, cities and landscapes. (The cinematographer is Michał Dymek, who filmed the incredibly beautiful donkey drama “EO” last year.)
The story of “A Real Pain,” acquired by Searchlight Pictures during the festival, is not strictly autobiographical; If it were, it might well give the title a third meaning. But, nevertheless, it has a powerful personal dimension. A key location the characters visit, at the end of the film, is a house that belonged to members of Eisenberg's family before World War II. It's not the kind of detail you'd know to look for beforehand, but if you think about it afterwards, it begins to seem revealing, leading to a sense of loss and longing that reverberates, almost retroactively, in every frame.
Sundance has long been a haven for semi-autobiographical stories from up-and-coming filmmakers, particularly those with less firmly established Hollywood roots than Eisenberg. The old adage of “write what you know” can, at its worst, give young authors license to indulge their most solipsistic instincts; It has also produced some of the festival's standout entries in recent years, including Lulu Wang's “The Farewell,” Lee Isaac Chung's “Minari,” Radha Blank's “The 40-Year-Old Version” and “Past Lives.” by Celine Song. The tradition, of course, goes back even further; Watching Eisenberg, now 40, in “A Real Pain,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the fresher version of him that appeared onscreen in 2005’s “The Squid and the Whale,” Noah’s wonderful Sundance film Baumbach. He released a comedy-drama about his own parents' divorce.
André Holland and Andra Day in the film “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” which premiered at Sundance.
(Sundance Institute)
This year’s American Drama Competition offers its own semi-autobiographical bounty, including two I’m looking forward to seeing: Sean Wang’s “Dìdi (弟弟),” which won an Audience Award and an Choral Performance Award, and Laura Chinn’s “Suncoast.” . which won an acting award for her young star, Nico Parker. (“A Real Pain,” meanwhile, won the competition’s Waldo Salt Screenplay Award.) They were joined in that section by “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” an often harsh but powerfully performed drama about intergenerational angst drawn from the personal experience of its first actor. -Filmmaker of the time, the painter Titus Kaphar.
His alter ego here is a successful artist, Tarrell (André Holland), whose happy home life with his singer-songwriter wife (Andra Day) and young son contrasts starkly with the pain of his own upbringing. That trauma, ever present, rises to the surface when La'Ron (John Earl Jelks), the father Tarrell hasn't seen in years, suddenly returns to her life, reopening a Pandora's box of memories involving neglect, abuse and alcoholism. .
The one who unexpectedly pushes Tarrell toward forgiveness is his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), whose Christian faith has allowed her to release her own anger toward La'Ron. Watching “Exhibiting Forgiveness” often reminded me of the lessons of my own distant evangelical upbringing: namely, that forgiveness is primarily a release of anger and ill will toward an offender, rather than a commitment to trust or reconciliation. Kaphar tends to exaggerate these and other ideas, including the therapeutic value of art, but his work with his actors is always excellent: to see Joyce and Tarrell wrestle with their convictions and emotions in a furious argument is to witness Ellis-Taylor and Holland in the peak of his powers. Here, too, real pain seems to break through the surface of filmmaking.
Sebastian Stan in the movie “A Different Man.”
(A24)
But what if that pain is not? Recognized so real to those around us? What if a spectacle of authentic human suffering is obscured by disfiguring layers of flesh or, in a bitterly ironic twist, hidden by a physical beauty that people assume is superficial and without depth? These and many other questions arise over the course of Aaron Schimberg's “A Different Man,” a self-deconstructing meta-pretzel of a black comedy that premiered in the festival's high-profile premieres section. By turns a Woody Allen-esque riff on imitating the art of life and a Cronenbergian study in flesh, blood, and the transference of identity, it was by far the most daring and continually surprising film I saw at Park City, and I will avoid revealing it before. you have the opportunity to see it. (It will premiere in competition at the Berlin International Film Festival next month and will be released by A24 later this year.)
Sebastian Stan plays Edward, an actor with a genetic condition known as neurofibromatosis, visualized here by large, fleshy facial prosthetics. The film's inciting twist is the discovery of an experimental procedure that could cure Edward of his disfigurement: a scientific miracle that Schimberg wisely leaves unexplained. What follows is a series of mistaken identities and baffling coincidences involving Edward 2.0 (now played by Stan himself), his playwright neighbor (Renate Reinsve of “The Worst Person in the World”), and an insistent third party, Oswald, played. of the English actor Adam Pearson, who also suffers from neurofibromatosis.
Pearson previously worked with Schimberg on 2018's “Chained for Life,” five years after his memorable screen debut in Jonathan Glazer's “Under the Skin,” a title that could have worked just as well for “A Different Man.” Her arrival in this film sends it spinning wildly (but with just enough control) in multiple provocative directions, almost all of which end in a question mark. By presenting an actor with a disorder in a film starring an actor who feigns that disorder, is Schimberg's film attempting to court or preempt his own representational critique? Does Edward's transformation reaffirm—or mock—the growing notion that only an authentically lived experience can entitle an artist to tell a particular story? This isn't the first or last time that question has come up at Sundance, though at this point it's hard to imagine it being asked in a more delirious way.
