If humanity were one day forced to welcome a celebrity overlord, it could do worse than the tuxedoed face of Jesse Eisenberg.
At least that's what the scene suggested at the New York Film Festival this weekend, where a disturbingly large Eisenberg – Zooming in from Budapest – literally and figuratively hovered over the proceedings on Sunday.
“Please tell me you're in costume,” said actor Kieran Culkin, looking at the looming human penguin.
“Yes, this is my costume. The last time I wore a tuxedo by myself was a bar mitzvah,” Eisenberg reflects. (The director was ready for a day of filming his new Now you see me movie.)
The occasion of the NYFF gathering was the premiere of Searchlight A real painEisenberg's Sundance sensation (which he wrote, directed and stars in) with projects on awards and audiences when it hits theaters on November 1st.
The film centers on cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) as they embark on a trip to Poland to visit Holocaust sites and pay homage to their recently deceased grandmother, a survivor who immigrated to the United States. A meditation on personal pain and historical tragedy wrapped in the guise of an odd-couple comedy, the film ensures that complex questions of identity and responsibility come with all the laughs.
“I think I probably have a depressive view of the world, maybe, probably,” Eisenberg said. “Yet I like making jokes more than anything. So the film is really, in a way, a kind of push and pull between something absurd and hilarious and also representative of a kind of pain for the world, a pain for modernity.
The story had an unusual origin. “I saw an advertisement on the Internet that said 'Auschwitz tour (with lunch)'. It seemed like something to write about,” Eisenberg recalled. “The implications are that we want, as a modern middle-class culture, to go and experience the trauma of our ancestors but at the same time we don't want to give up any of our material pleasures and well-being.”
He paused.
«And now I have said this [Auschwitz With Lunch] and your phone answered, you'll see the ad for it,” he told the NYFF audience.
Filmed before October 7 and the wave of global anti-Semitic incidents it unleashed, the film nevertheless arrives a year later with unsettling timing, implicitly asking how to deal with a historical trauma whose causes have not been eliminated. Nor does the film focus on the pain of one group.
“I feel like it's all about connecting with your family roots…and the amount of loneliness and suffering that we all hold onto all the time,” said Jennifer Grey, who plays a divorcee on the tour with Benji and David. “And not just the painful struggle of a grief-stricken person to survive, but also how we are resilient and foolish and all those things that can exist at the same time.”
Eisenberg added: “I realized that you can make a Holocaust story loaded with all the horrors and pain of the Holocaust, but if you make it about real people really going through their own pain and personal conflicts you can have something that it can exist in that careful tone without being too irreverent.”
A real pain marks the second consecutive year that Holocaust concentration camps are seen through an unorthodox on-screen lens, following 2023 The area of interest centered on the Nazis who live next door. Much of the new film's power comes from Culkin's Benji, an unfiltered character who is both defiant and vulnerable — a kind of identity of conscience — and from his comic friction with Eisenberg's stern David. Their banter, it seems, did not end in conclusion.
Eisenberg said, “You know how you always hear those stories about those Hollywood directors falling in love with their actresses? I felt it [for Culkin]. He's so funny, so charming, so depressed, so witty and also light and dark at the same time.
Culkin added, “You actually told me that thing on set about how people fall in love with their actresses.” (Break.) “You said that about three feet away from me while I was sweating. How should I react to this? 'Are you leaving now?'”
“Yes. I think that's how you reacted. I mean, you could have just said 'fine, thanks.' Or 'hey, I like working with you too.'” (Break) “You still can,” Eisenberg replied.
Culkin then said, “I'll work towards it.”