Jesse Eisenberg delivers a story tethered to the human condition of longing for something “else” or “more” in the triumphant A Real Pain. Directed, written, and starring Eisenberg, the film perfectly balances dry humor and understated, character-driven drama. At a well-paced 90 minutes, the story never overstays its welcome. Instead, the story succeeds because, despite its brevity, it streamlines a beautifully executed narrative that needs no more or less than what it’s being given. 

A Real Pain follows David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), two cousins who could be mistaken for brothers for how closely they grew up together. However, despite being born mere weeks apart, they’re polar opposites. Despite this, they share an often exasperated fondness for one another—with David, in particular, keeping a watchful eye out for Benji. In order to honor their late grandmother, the two embark on a tour of Poland to explore their family history while paying their respects at their grandmother’s childhood home. 

There’s a simplistic, linear structure to the film that could easily be mistaken as dull. But the rapid-fire dialogue and meditations on life and losses embolden the otherwise straightforward story with unexpected vigor. Eisenberg and cinematographer Michał Dymek shoot everything from the bustling airport to the Polish countryside with grace as we move forward along with these characters. 

However, while the direction is confident and observational, especially when highlighting the magnitude of emotions Culkin’s face bears while still withholding, the writing pulls it all together. The script is simply remarkable in its conscious depiction of vulnerability that’s almost too raw to watch. Eisenberg’s script feels personal, even if it’s fictional, and it’s best seen in the relationship between Benji and David. 

Despite his constant proclamations of how much he loves his cousin, how close they are, and how integral David is in his life, Benji is quick to punch down and belittle. He tells David that no one likes to walk alone when talking about another traveler, yet leaves him in the dust to speak with her instead. He calls out his insecurities in public while telling him that he has no problem with his cousin’s shortcomings. Eisenberg captures the grind of it, shoulders hunching further and further as he either apologizes for Benji’s behavior or watches in amazement as Benji somehow pulls off being a brazen ass with little consequence. 

And that’s because as impulsive and self-righteous Benji is, so many of his tirades have just enough truth to make them justifiable. Even while so many of us would shrink away from the kind of conflict he so vigorously chases, we can’t deny that he comes from a place of honesty. It’s the critical difference between Benji and David. David believes there’s a time and place to express pain and grief. Benji unleashes it all like a tidal wave. 

It’s what makes the centerpiece moment of the film, a taut and revealing dinner, all the more poignant. While it seems like David is getting his moment to unload and overshare, as Benji might, with no repercussions, the dynamics of the group tour remain unchanged. It’s a brilliantl sequence that shoulders the weight of the tension into a precarious position. We understand why Benji draws people in. And, aided by Culkin’s tumultuous performance, we feel for him and the hurdles he’s grappling with. But it’s hard not to feel how David wilts in his presence viscerally.

There’s just such honesty when David tells others or even Benji himself about the envy he harbors. It’s a profoundly relatable phenomenon. The ability to adore someone and yet be jealous of what you perceive they have that you don’t. In my pettiest, ugliest moments, I long to be prettier. I want to be thinner and have a life that affords me more time, money, and energy to achieve a desired weight. Sometimes, I wish to be more naturally funny and intellectual. I long for all of these elements that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things because we’re all largely longing for something that would make us, in our own mind’s eye, better than the sum of our parts. It’s so frustratingly human for us to do so. 

A Real Pain captures that bruising frustration. The film is still wickedly funny, with Culkin’s wry and motormouth delivery landing some searing punches. But any longevity the film has is due to the script, which is far more revealing and prickly than trailers might suggest. Introspective yet light on its feet, it speaks to any of us who’ve ever struggled to find our footing in a dynamic. To call the relationship between Benji and David toxic would dismiss the writing. Instead, it showcases the messiness of what comes when we grow up along someone only for our paths to minutely diverge over time until what we miss isn’t what have in the present but who we had in the past. 

Aided by two dynamic central performances, A Real Pain is a vibrant character study. With cutting humor and well-paced introspection, the film allows grief room to breathe without any easy answers. Love and mourning are messy, and Eisenberg’s script honors this. 

A Real Pain is out now in theaters. 

Images courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.

Related

NEW YORK (OSV News) – Why not make a Christmas-themed action flick starring Dwayne Johnson as Kris Kringle’s chief bodyguard? The answer to that question is revealed in “Red One” (Amazon MGM).

The attempt to put Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) in the middle of a lot of frenetic brawling and then wrap the whole thing up with a climactic sleigh chase leads to a hopelessly unbalanced tone in this ill-conceived holiday offering. Despite a conversion story for one of the main characters, moreover, this is far too hard-edged a production to be in any way family-friendly.

After St. Nick is kidnapped, Johnson’s Callum Drift and his team trace the breach of North Pole security that enabled the abduction to gifted but mercenary internet hacker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans). Since cynical Jack has, since childhood, denied the very existence of the Jolly One, however, it soon becomes clear that, for all his moral shortcomings, he was acting inadvertently.

Belatedly realizing what a catastrophe he’s helped bring about, Jack agrees to help Callum and his boss, Zoe (Lucy Liu), catch the real culprit. But straight-arrow Callum has taken an instant dislike to this shady scoundrel, and only agrees to team with him under orders from Zoe. So the newly-minted odd couple take up the chase.

Clues eventually lead them to one of Santa’s long-standing adversaries, a shape-shifting witch called Gryla (Kiernan Shipka). With Santa neutralized, she plans to ruin the impending holiday by punishing every person on his naughty list. Needless to say, that means a host of potential victims around the world.

The mayhem Gryla’s nefarious plot unleashes remains thoroughly stylized throughout and the values put forward in an almost preachy way by Chris Morgan’s script are respectable from a Judeo-Christian perspective. Thus Gryla is about retribution, but Santa, who sees the inner child in even the most wayward grown-up, is about mercy and forbearance.

As for Jack, isn’t it high time he worked on being a better father to his mildly misbehaving son, Dylan (Wesley Kimmel)? The lad’s mom, Olivia (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) — to whom, we learn, Jack was never married — certainly thinks so.

All well and good. Yet, cinematically, director Jake Kasdan never finds his footing. Nor does it seem likely that he ever could have, since early scenes alternately set in Aruba and at the site of Santa’s captivity may have viewers of a certain age imagining the effect of Father Christmas wandering into an episode of “Miami Vice.”

To put it another way, Dasher and Dashiell Hammett simply do not mix.

Additionally, “Red One” is a good reminder that not every Yuletide movie is geared toward youngsters. In this case, the screenplay’s vulgar vocabulary, while certainly not excessive by Hollywood standards, does flag the proceedings as strictly off-limits for kids.

The film contains considerable bloodless violence, fleeting partial nudity, references to a character’s out-of-wedlock birth, about a dozen instances each of mild swearing and crude language, at least one rough term and a couple of crass expressions. The OSV News classification is A-III — adults.  The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 — parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.

Copyright © 2024 OSV News

 Print

A secret center of the musical theater universe lies almost 3,000 miles from Broadway in a modestly grand house in Toluca Lake. On a late summer day, the home’s most striking feature was the figure of a white standard French poodle. Visible through one of the windows flanking the front door, she sat so still that she might have been mistaken for a statue, like the lion-dogs that guard the entrance to a Shinto shrine.

If musical theater had a canine sentinel, it might well be a standard French poodle. But no. When the door opened, the dog, Belle, sniffed politely before trotting deeper into the house, neon-green-painted nails flashing, to pause briefly beside her owner: Eric Vetro, perhaps the leading vocal teacher and trainer of bold-faced names on stage and screen, including several of the leads in the upcoming film adaptation of “Wicked.”

Ariana Grande, who plays Galinda, has spoken often and at length about how long and how rigorously she worked on raising her pitch and honing her voice before auditioning for her dream role — and Vetro is the man who coached her.

Just as he coached Jonathan Bailey for his role as Fieyro. Just as he worked with Jeremy Allen White for his performance as Bruce Springsteen in the upcoming “Deliver Me From Nowhere” and Timothée Chalamet for “Willy Wonka” and the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown.” And Renée Zellweger for her Oscar-winning performance as Judy Garland in “Judy.” And Lea Michele for “Funny Girl,” Austin Butler for “Elvis,” Josh Gad for “The Book of Mormon” and “Frozen,” Emily Blunt for “Into the Woods” and “Mary Poppins Returns,” Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling for “La La Land” and Halle Bailey and Melissa McCarthy for “The Little Mermaid.”

The list goes on and on and on. It also includes plenty of equally well-known recording artists, such as John Legend, Shawn Mendes, Katy Perry and Pink. Indeed, if a famous actor or singer refers to the work they’ve done with a vocal coach, there’s a very good chance they are talking about Vetro. Invariably in very glowing terms.

“Even though my range has always been high soprano,” Grande says via email, “Galinda requires a very different technique, and has a very different sound than the one I use to sing my pop music. Her voice is classical and operatic, and I had the honor of working on that every day together with Eric in preparation. [He] would paint Belle’s nails pink and green and put little pink ribbons in her hair to send me off before each audition or callback,” she adds. “Not only is he the best at what he does but he is truly the most thoughtful and kindest man in the world.”

Dressed, on this day, in black Prada jacket and shoes, which match his meticulously groomed short beard and hair, Vetro, 68, is an arresting figure, with a ready and dazzlingly white smile and the slender, expressive hands of a piano player. That’s how he got into music, initially — he’s played piano since he was 5. A voice major at New York University, he worked in cabaret for many years, learning, he says, the valuable lesson of listening, both to what a person’s voice can do, and also to what it should do.

“So many young girls can belt it out and they get known for having a big voice. But that cheats them. You have to listen carefully and adjust, get them to understand that some voices are more beautiful when they’re not bigger.”

His work as a musician, teacher and adviser led him to L.A., where, he says, “I kept meeting people and getting coaching jobs. If you throw yourself into it 100 percent, you’re going to get noticed.”

In the beginning, most of his clients were outside the entertainment industry: nurses, waiters, people who just wanted to sing better. Then he got hired by Craig Zaden and Neil Marin to work on the 1999 remake of “Annie,” which led to “Chicago,” “Hairspray” and “Hairspray Live.” He began working with Bette Midler during her Vegas residency, Hugh Jackman on “Boy From Oz” and Grande, who began working with Vetro when she was 23. “Once you get going,” Vetro says, “it just snowballs. Now I don’t work with ‘regular’ people at all.”

Now he works on movies, theatrical shows, musical tours, brought in by directors, producers and musical directors to work with performers with a variety of experience levels and demands — singers, like Grande, moving into musical acting roles; actors, like Blunt, in their first singing roles; artists on tour, and performers who are looking to grow their voice or achieve a specific sound.

For actors like Butler, White, Zellweger and Chalamet, who need to channel a well-known voice the first step is being aware of the voice they have.

“We start with voice lessons so they understand their own voice,” Vetro says. “Then we start with the realm of another voice. It might be pronunciation, or where they take their breaths or the accent. We start vocalizing in character — I asked Renee, ‘What would Judy think of this exercise?’”

The goal is to capture the essence of the person, he says. “You don’t want it to be an impersonation.”

Vetro says he has only turned one client away — a well-known model who had been offered a role on Broadway. “He was very good-looking, charming. And then he opened his mouth. I said, ‘If this were a movie, maybe, but for you to sing on Broadway is never going to happen.’ His girlfriend called me later to thank me.”

Thanks to a recently released BBC Maestro series, however, “regular people” can get the Vetro treatment. He is filming it on this particular summer day, on which his home is filled not just with two pianos and multiple keyboards, but also lights, cameras and sound equipment.

For about 30 minutes, he works with longtime students, singer-songwriter Heidi Webster and singer-actor David Burnham. Burnham, who played “Wicked’s” Fiyero on Broadway, started working with Vetro after he was cast in a Universal Studios theme park show. “Eric realigned my voice,” he says. “I have recordings of him doing lessons that I use before every Broadway show.”

Vetro with students Heidi Webster and David Burnham.

(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)

“Lessons” include singing scales with one’s hands in the air, dropping on the high note, or bending forward and being pulled up by the ascension of notes.

“We’re like athletes,” Burnham says. “Runners don’t race without warming up.”

There’s also a lot of breathing exercises — the famous “hee hee heeee,” jaw-dropping, face-wagging, arm-waving and humming through a straw, sometimes into a cup of water.

“It’s amazing what you can do with a straw,” says Jonathan Bailey via email. “I thought we elevated it two levels when instead of using a cup of water we used champagne flutes, which I just thought was the height of sophistication. He always had a naughty twinkle in his eye and we laughed and laughed and laughed.”

In preparation for “Wicked,” Bailey began working with Vetro, often over Zoom, while still filming “Fellow Travelers.”

“A real challenge for me was that I was filming in Canada and London and going back and forth. With ‘Fellow Travelers,’ I’d do 21-hour days where I’d either have to shout or sometimes I’d have to smoke,” he says. “[Eric] sees you at all different moments of the day and in all different levels of excitability. It’s amazing, you start in your sort of home setting with him and build such a kinship and make such a friendship that he becomes sort of a spiritual guru.”

Vetro’s love of his clients and craft is palpable. The walls of his studio are papered with photographs of his students (and their various awards), and the fondness with which he speaks of them appears to be boundless and utterly sincere; he radiates positive energy. He needs to — being the entertainment industry’s go-to vocal coach is not a 9-to-5 gig. Vetro works pretty much round the clock, often consulting in several time zones. After filming the BBC piece and doing this interview, he will work with one student in Australia at 5 and another, in London, at 11.

Friends tell him he needs to take a vacation once in a while, he says, but he has no interest. There’s always, as they say, another opening, another show.

“I just love it so much,” he says. “It does not feel like work. I’d rather do this than anything.”