is a whip-sharp comedy driven by the rattling verbal sparring between uptight, neurotic David (Eisenberg) and his outgoing, unpredictable cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin). It’s also a profound character study – a substantial and emotionally nourishing journey that contains, courtesy of Culkin, perhaps the most devastating final shot of any film you will see this year.
: the writing is sublimely satisfying and textured, the characters persuasively realised, and the jostling, combative dialogue feels fully alive and refreshingly unpredictable, rather than a laboured assortment of words on a page.
when writing the character of Benji, a gregarious, directionless stoner who still lives in his mother’s basement.
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last year, starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham as a father and daughter reconnecting with their Jewish roots in Poland, will attest that it is horribly easy to make a honking, tone-deaf misfire out of material like this.
The charged bond between the cousins is the heart of the film. Close since childhood, theirs is a loving but conflicted relationship that, for reasons which become clear, has grown increasingly fraught of late. Equally revealing is the way they relate to the world around them. David loiters, painfully self-conscious, on the periphery of conversations; Benji plunges in with abandon and emerges with shared secrets and potted life stories.
For better or worse, Benji leaves a mark on the other members of the tour group; David barely registers as an afterthought. But the social ease with which Benji is blessed doesn’t mean that he is at peace as a person. Quite the opposite. The lack of filter that permits him to break the ice and bond with strangers also means that he lashes out indiscriminately – at the hapless British tour guide (a droll turn from Will Sharpe); at his cousin, for having the temerity to move on with his life and start a family; at his fellow travellers and the inherent tackiness of luxury trauma tourism.
Eisenberg’s soundtrack choices – the film plays out to busy, nervy piano pieces by Chopin – work neatly, providing a brisk rhythm for the metronomic editing of snapshots of modern-day Poland. The real power, though, comes when the bustling music stops and we finally start to grasp the terrifying emptiness and uncertainty that Benji faces.
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