Kieran Culkin’s mile-a-minute turn in A Real Pain was the single most lauded performance of this past awards season, winning pretty much every best supporting actor prize on offer, up to and including his Oscar two weeks ago. As an erratic, unfiltered loose cannon joining his strait-laced cousin, played by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland in honour of their familial roots, Culkin is rivetingly reckless and off-kilter in the part.
The awards are well deserved except for the key detail that it isn’t remotely a supporting role. An evenly weighted two-hander (now streaming, and on DVD from 17 March), Eisenberg’s second film behind the camera is a sharp and moving variation on the classic formula of the mismatched buddy movie, deriving all its comic and dramatic tension from the contrast between Eisenberg’s nebbishy neurosis and Culkin’s cocksure eccentricity. This personality conflict is ultimately neutralised by the gravity of their journey, as the history of the Holocaust weighs heavily upon them; most buddy movies aren’t quite so burdened. But the love-hate dynamic between the two men is poignant and funny, and squarely in the tradition of the genre.
