Jesse Eisenberg’s second film sends two cousins on a Holocaust tour of Poland and lets Kieran Culkin loose on it. It is funny, short and sadder than it lets on; it is also thinner around the edges than the performance at its centre.
Jesse Eisenberg has written and directed a comedy about two Jewish American cousins who fly to Poland to see the camps, and he has cast himself as the one you are not meant to warm to. David Kaplan (Eisenberg) has a job, a wife, a small son and a bottle of pills. Benji (Kieran Culkin) has a bedroom in his mother’s basement and a habit of saying what everyone else is too polite to say. Their grandmother has died and left them money to see the country she survived and left, so they join a small heritage tour and plan to finish at her old house. It runs 90 minutes, funny for most of them and sad for the rest, and it is at its best whenever Culkin is talking. When he stops, you notice how little has been built around him.
Culkin is the reason to see it. Benji hugs strangers at the airport, hands round a joint on a hotel roof, tells the guide his tour has too many dates and not enough people, and cries at things nobody else has noticed. Culkin does not play any of this for charm. He plays a man who is right about half the time and unbearable for all of it, and he keeps the panic visible under the noise. It is the best work he has done.
Eisenberg gives himself the thinner part and plays it honestly. He has spent twenty years as the fast-talking anxious one, and David is that man grown up and wanting credit for it: he has coped, he has medicated, and he cannot understand why nobody is impressed. The script sides with Benji more often than it should, and in the middle David’s case is made for him in a speech rather than found in a scene. Even so, the two of them are good company, and the film knows when to leave them alone in a hotel room.
The moment we keep coming back to is early, in Warsaw. Benji decides the group should climb on to a war memorial and pose among the bronze soldiers, while David hangs back with the camera and the face of a man whose flight has been cancelled. We laughed, properly, and then we did not much want to have. That is how the film works: the joke and the discomfort arrive together and Eisenberg does not tell you which one to keep.
Michał Dymek shoots Poland in flat grey daylight with no attempt to make it pretty, and stays close on faces in trains, coaches and hotel corridors. Between scenes Robert Nassau cuts to still shots of blocks of flats, tram stops, a courtyard, a synagogue, and the only music under them is Chopin, on a solo piano and left alone. Mela Melak’s hotels look like every package-tour hotel you have stayed in, which is right. Małgorzata Fudala puts Benji in cargo shorts and a hoodie, dressed for a different holiday, and David in the zipped jacket of a man who has read the itinerary. The tour’s most serious stop is shot without music and almost without words, and that is the correct decision.
The trouble is everyone who is not a Kaplan. Will Sharpe’s James is a British guide who studied all this at university and lost nobody to it, and Sharpe plays him carefully, as a man who knows the dates and is starting to suspect they are not enough. He gets one scene where Benji takes him apart and one where he answers, and both are good. The others get less. Jennifer Grey’s Marcia is recently divorced, Kurt Egyiawan’s Eloge survived Rwanda and converted, and Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy are a married couple who mostly nod. Each is handed one speech and a reaction shot. Egyiawan makes the most of his, and the film seems aware there is a larger story in Eloge that it has decided not to tell.
Set against Eisenberg’s first film as a director, When You Finish Saving the World, this is a clear step up: warmer, funnier and less pleased with its own bad mood. Set against the odd-couple road film in general it sits in the upper half, held there by one performance. The last stretch declines to tie anything off. Some critics have found that a little cold; we found it honest.
Watch it with a relative you love and would not choose to travel with, and do not expect the film to tell either of you who was right.
