Over a nearly two-decade acting career, Jesse Eisenberg has established an energy so distinct you could describe the characters and the movies around them by his name – wordy, wry, brimming with nerves and discomfort. He can deliver a scathing deadpan, as in The Social Network, or a rapid-fire spit of anxieties, most recently in Fleishman Is in Trouble. He’s a natural fit for a certain type of small-stakes, character-driven indie dramedy, as was his first feature as a writer-director, last year’s When You Finish Saving the World, about fractured, lonely, sardonic family of three; its humorous, wincing journey of social awkwardness, as the New Yorker bluntly put it, “very Jesse Eisenberg”.
For better or for worse, his second feature, A Real Pain, is even more Jesse Eisenberg – in part because he plays a talky and tightly wound character – but with a mistier eye and sweeter heart than its forbearer. (The film counts Emma Stone and her husband, the SNL writer Dave McCary, as producers.) Still, it’s a dramedy of discontents: we meet Eisenberg’s David Kaplan, a New Yorker who sells digital ads for a living, making a series of anxious phone calls to cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin), an impishly charming idler, in his trademark nervous patter. They’re bound for Poland to visit the homeland of their grandmother, owing to her final wishes and, in their own way, nagging guilt over the weight of historical trauma. Their grandma Dory was one of the lucky ones, a Polish Jew who escaped the Holocaust and built a new life.
