Jack and I liked a lot this story of adult American cousins of very different personalities traveling to Poland to research their family history, including a trip to a Lublin concentration camp. Jesse Eisenberg directs, wrote the screenplay, and stars as the organized, anxious Benji, a role he fills beautifully. Kieran Culkin was born to play spontaneous, pushy, relentless cousin Benji, who embodies one interpretation of the movie's title. It's not for everyone. In fact our friend Cathy cringed so much she had to turn it off and told me "maybe" she'll get back to it. There are plenty of laughs, though, between the cringes and tears.
The small ensemble includes Jennifer Grey as one of the tour guests, Will Sharpe as the tour guide, and eight year old Banner Eisenberg making his debut playing his real life father's son.
So far the movie has 52 wins and 90 other nominations, including Oscar prospects for Eisenberg's script and Culkin's Benji. Jack wonders how much acting Culkin had to do to portray that character. He heard an interview in which Eisenberg said that Culkin did not even read the script before showing up for shooting, but obviously it paid off, because Culkin alone has so far, by my count, 34 wins and 26 other nominations for the role.
The story has many themes mashed up: the odd couple's relationship, the caretaking required, the foreign tour, the history, the holocaust, and grief in general.
No composer is named and most of the music is piano solos composed by Frederic Chopin, who was Polish (I had assumed he was French – the Warsaw airport is named for him), and performed by Tzvi Erez.
Eisenberg was last blogged for acting in
Zombieland: Double Tap after which I liked his annoying title character in all eight episodes of Fleishman Is in Trouble. He has directed one other feature which I haven't seen. Culkin was most recently in these pages for the COVID lockdown short
Father of the Bride 3 which was shot on hiatus from his 39 Succession episodes. Grey is best known for starring in Dirty Dancing (1987) but she took no time off and has dozens of other credits, including all 26 episodes of It's Like, You Know... in which she played a version of herself named Jennifer Grey. Sharpe's credits include seven episodes of The White Lotus season two as Aubrey Plaza's character's husband.
Rotten Tomatoes' critics are quite comfortable, averaging 96%, while its critics may have a little ache at 81. We watched it on a streamer from the Independent Feature Project on January 14 but it's now available to stream on Hulu or Disney+ with a subscription and to rent everywhere else.