The 2024 U.S. Dramatic Competition program at Sundance this year featured the expected variety of voices from the independent film scene, stories from different backgrounds, classes, races, and genders. The three films from the program in this dispatch could all be called character studies, but what’s invigorating is how wildly different these characters are, and that at least one of them is going to be talked about all year.
That one is the incredible leap that writer/director/star Jesse Eisenberg takes with his second feature, the excellent “A Real Pain.” I felt like his Sundance debut, “When You Finish Saving the World,” faltered in part because it seemed like a film that didn’t really like its characters. This is the opposite of that, a deeply empathetic work that’s about the limits of understanding each other’s pain, but also about how that shouldn’t keep us from sympathy. It’s about tourists through one of the darkest chapters in human history, people who are removed by time and circumstance from what they’re actually considering, but respectful of it nonetheless. At the same time, it’s about two cousins who live very different lives, and how they try to understand each other, while also realizing they never fully will.
Eisenberg’s rich script for “A Real Pain,” which just won the jury award at Sundance for writing, is the kind of nuanced character study that I could talk about for hours, but the main draw of this film is going to be the phenomenal performance from Kieran Culkin. The recent Emmy winner from “Succession” proves that he is going to be a major force for years to come, giving an acting turn that I’m going to be annoying about during the next awards season. It’s that raw, organic, and subtle—one of the best pieces of acting I’ve seen in my decade-plus of covering Sundance.
Who is Benji? He’s the kind of guy who gets to the airport many hours early, not because he’s nervous about making his flight, but because he wants to meet people, and he’s lonely on his couch at home. Most of us have that kind of friend, the person who already knows the name of everyone in the bar while you’re parking the car. Benji is a people person through and through, someone who seems honestly invested in everyone he meets. He’s also deeply, deeply sad. You can see it in Culkin’s eyes as Benji embarks on a journey with his cousin David (Eisenberg, doing his best film work in years) to join a tour group in Poland, visiting a concentration camp and splitting off to see the home in which their grandmother was raised (the actual home in the film belonged to Eisenberg’s grandma.) Benji was very close to his grandma, and she recently passed, turning the trip into an act of potential closure.
Culkin takes what could have been a very showy part—the manic traveling companion has been done before—and imbues it with a sense of truth, something that emerges from emotions he can’t control. And while this buddy duo feels a bit simple on paper—Benji is too reckless while David is too conservative—the two performers find such a believable chemistry as something akin to brothers. They are two people who want to understand, and possibly even be more like one another, and they have to go all the way back to where their grandmother called home to figure out the limitations of both. Without spoiling, they don’t find some sort of pat Hollywood resolution that makes them closer, but they do walk away with a greater understanding of not each other but themselves.
A very different kind of trip is taken in India Donaldson’s strong debut “Good One,” featuring a breakout performance from the naturally excellent Lily Collias. She plays Sam, a 17-year-old on a camping trip in the Catskills with her dad Chris (James Le Gros) and his friend Matt (Danny McCarthy). Matt’s son was supposed to come but his teenage apathy has been amplified by the fact that mom and dad are getting divorced. He doesn’t feel like walking through the woods with pop. At first, there’s a sort of sad-sack sympathy engendered for Matt, and McCarthy plays this character’s emotional flatness well. He’s going through a rough chapter in his life, and his kid isn’t there for him. At least Chris has a “good one.”
Donaldson basically acts as an observer, a fourth traveling companion through these lovingly-shot woods. Chris is kind of a jerk, the A-type personality who mocks Matt’s physical shape and accuses Sam of packing wrong—when she says he did that, we believe her. It’s probably not the first time he’s blamed her for his flaws. Le Gros deftly captures the kind of guy who gently pushes people around in every aspect of his life. It led to the divorce from Sam’s mother, and she’s now about to have a half-sister with Chris’ new much-younger wife. He’s that guy, and it’s obvious from the very beginning. Matt is a little harder to pin down … until he isn’t.
Both Chris and Matt leave these woods in an air of failure that won’t be spoiled, but what works so well about “Good One” is how it echoes the observational skill of its protagonist. Collias has a remarkable ability to do something that’s often hard for actors her age: listen. A lot of young actors often look like they’re waiting for their turn to say their line instead of actually existing in the moment, responding to their scene partner’s dialogue and action. Collias grounds “Good One” in every single scene, leaving those woods a victor in both character and performer.
Finally, there’s Nathan Silver’s fun and sweet “Between the Temples,” further proof after his phenomenal turn in “Asteroid City” that middle-aged Jason Schwartzman is going to be something special. He’s once again excellent as Ben Gottlieb (“Even my name is past tense”), a cantor who has lost his faith and his ability to sing due to a deep well of grief. His life is turned around when a grade-school teacher named Carol Kessler (Carol Kane) comes back into his life with a desire to be his Bat Mitzvah student. More than just a ‘May/December’ awkward comedy, “Between the Temples” is a shaggy character study, a loosely structured study of the human condition with strong performances, effective 16mm photography from Sean Price Williams, and kinetic editing from John Magary.
With supporting characters that feel like archetypes like the doting mother (Caroline Aaron), meddling rabbi (Robert Smigel), and even a love interest in the rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein), “Between the Temples” is the kind of Sundance comedy that shouldn’t work. It should be too cutesy, twee, or laden with life lessons. The remarkable thing about Silver’s work is how many of the traps it avoids, reminding us how this kind of thing can be done well when it feels focused on character and truth instead of theme or message. It’s a hard film to make sound appealing in that the market is filled with unbearable stories of very different people finding the common ground they both need to heal, but it’s a reminder that the film world can still make space for stories like this one when they’re done well, and a reminder that sometimes healing can come from the most unexpected places. Good comedies too.
