A Real Pain (15, 90 minutes)
Verdict: Truly wonderful
Jesse Eisenberg has said that he was inspired to write A Real Pain after coming across an online advert promoting tours of the concentration camp Auschwitz, with lunch included.
He has parlayed that darkly comic irony — the unwitting but shrieking dissonance between the monumental evil and human misery implied by one word, Auschwitz, and the lush comforts of modern-day tourism — into a truly wonderful film.
A Real Pain is uproariously funny, quietly witty, achingly sad and excruciatingly well-observed. That’s quite a trick to pull off inside an hour and a half.
Eisenberg plays David, with Kieran Culkin (newly anointed with a Golden Globe for his brilliant performance) as his first cousin Benji.
New York Jews, born just a few weeks apart, they have always been close despite the differences in their personalities, not to mention their hyphenated disorders.
David, married with a son, is obsessive-compulsive, socially anxious, introspective. Benji is single, sociable and charismatic. He is also hyper-active and deeply troubled, with attention-deficit issues.
Will Sharpe (left) and Jesse Eisenberg (right) as their characters James and David and in a scene from A Real Pain
Kieran Culkin (left) and Jesse Eisenberg (right) as their characters Benji and David in A Real Pain
We meet them as they prepare to leave for Poland, where they will join a ‘Holocaust tour’ as a way of honouring their grandmother Dory, a survivor, who has recently died.
They plan to peel off the tour for the last couple of days to find the house where Dory lived before she was hauled off to the camps.
The two contrasting personality types afford Eisenberg numerous opportunities for both poignancy and comedy, which he exploits beautifully.
He and Culkin, in some ways playing an even more unpredictable version of Roman Roy, his character in the TV hit Succession, are completely believable as loving cousins, although David, perennially envious of Benji’s magnetism, also finds him utterly exasperating. ‘I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, I want to be him,’ he tells the others in the party.
They have been written and cast perfectly, too. In particular, Will Sharpe (The White Lotus) is glorious as James, the kindly, non-Jewish tour leader from the north of England, upbraided by Benji in a cemetery for being too talkative.
That’s rich, coming from him, but then Culkin nails the contradictions in Benji, blithely trampling over people’s sensibilities yet with hair-trigger sensitivities of his own.
It is Benji alone who is discomfited by a group of 21st-century American Jews travelling first-class on a Polish train.
He declares that he is going to move to a standard-class compartment. ‘I don’t think you’ll find much suffering there, either,’ says one of his tour companions, wryly.
Jennifer Grey as her character Marcia in a scene from Jessie Eisenberg’s film A Real Pain
Excluding James, there are six on the tour, all Americans except for an African man, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who lost relatives in the Rwanda genocide, moved to Canada and converted to Judaism.
He is apparently modelled on a friend of Eisenberg’s, who has plundered his own life and heritage to make this film.
Indeed, the modest house where his Polish-born great-aunt once lived is used as Grandma Dory’s childhood home.
Pulling so strongly on his roots is one of many ways in which Eisenberg has become the heir to Woody Allen, both on screen as the smart, neurotic, weedy Jewish New Yorker (not much of a stretch by all accounts), and now as a writer and director.
Not everyone will consider that to be praise, but if you cherish the best of Allen’s films, the likes of Annie Hall (1977) and Hannah And Her Sisters (1986), then you will love A Real Pain.
I treasured every one of its 90 minutes — and what a lesson, by the way, in economy of story-telling. Allen was always good at that, too.
This is the movie he might well wish he’d made, and maybe could have done, once, except that it has oodles more heart and tenderness than most of his. It’s a small masterpiece.
Babygirl (18, 114 minutes)
Verdict: Clever and racy
The same claim cannot be made for Babygirl, and it’s not without some narrative silliness, but on the whole it’s a clever, racy, psychosexual thriller starring Nicole Kidman as Romy, a corporate hotshot who seems to be happily married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas), a theatre director, but then falls, heavily, for one of her company’s new intake of interns, the dishy, ultra-confident Samuel (Harris Dickinson).
Writer-director Halina Reijn’s film is not just the story of an illicit office affair across the age divide, however. Far more interestingly, it’s also about power and workplace politics.
Nicole Kidman as Romy, a corporate hotshot who seems to be happily married to Jacob (Antonio Banderas)
But then falls, heavily, for one of her company’s new intake of interns, the dishy, ultra-confident Samuel (Harris Dickinson)
Nicole Kidman as Romy and Harris Dickenson as Samuel during a racy scene in Babygirl
Samuel senses that Romy, whose job is telling others what to do, has a kinky yearning to be the one jumping to orders.
So the CEO and the intern switch roles; the boss becomes the bossed.
Both leads are excellent, especially Kidman. She has described it as the most ‘exposing’ performance she has ever given, which considering 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut, is quite something.
And Banderas, who has spent most of his career being nobody’s idea of a cuckold, gives first-class support.
As for the almost-unmentionable, the alleged cosmetic work that sometimes seems to have limited Kidman’s range of expressions from A only to about C, that is astutely woven into the story.
Romy is clearly the kind of woman who would make a friend of Botox. So, if you feel the need for an injection yourself this freezing January, of heat and steam, then give Babygirl a whirl.