Kieran Culkin’s mile-a-minute turn in A Real Pain was the single most lauded performance of this past awards season, winning pretty much every best supporting actor prize on offer, up to and including his Oscar two weeks ago. As an erratic, unfiltered loose cannon joining his strait-laced cousin, played by writer-director Jesse Eisenberg, on a Jewish heritage tour of Poland in honour of their familial roots, Culkin is rivetingly reckless and off-kilter in the part.
The awards are well deserved except for the key detail that it isn’t remotely a supporting role. An evenly weighted two-hander (now streaming, and on DVD from 17 March), Eisenberg’s second film behind the camera is a sharp and moving variation on the classic formula of the mismatched buddy movie, deriving all its comic and dramatic tension from the contrast between Eisenberg’s nebbishy neurosis and Culkin’s cocksure eccentricity. This personality conflict is ultimately neutralised by the gravity of their journey, as the history of the Holocaust weighs heavily upon them; most buddy movies aren’t quite so burdened. But the love-hate dynamic between the two men is poignant and funny, and squarely in the tradition of the genre.
It’s a film tradition that was firmly entrenched even by the timeThe Odd Couple most literally put a name to it in 1968. Neil Simon’s comedy about two divorcés – one a prissy neat-freak, the other a jockish slob – turned incompatible, roommates hinged on archetypes so broad they might not have seemed quite human if not for the light touch and irresistible chemistry of stars Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. It certainly provided a blueprint for any number of less deftly acted sitcoms in the subsequent decades.
The uptight-v-laid-back pairing is a fixture of the buddy movie: see Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s various fictionalised iterations of their real-life friendship in The Trip TV series. Ditto the John Hughes road movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which successfully cast Steve Martin as the Type-A straight man to the late John Candy’s bearish, gregarious oaf, in circumstances wildly contrived to make them travelling companions.
In the genre’s crime division, where by-the-book good cops are routinely partnered with, if not bad cops, at least decidedly offbeat ones, Lethal Weapon spun the initially amusing tight-loose tension between Danny Glover and Mel Gibson into four films, with diminishing returns. The Heat, hilariously pairing a tetchy, exasperated Sandra Bullock with a near-feral Melissa McCarthy, smartly kept it to just one. It’s a rare outlier in what remains a male-dominated formula: female buddy movies such as Thelma & Louise tend to be founded on more obvious, longstanding friendships.
The Tom Hanks vehicle Turner & Hooch replaced one human half of the buddy-cop pairing with a slobbering French mastiff. That’s pretty much the film’s single joke, but the dog is charismatic enough to sustain it. 48 Hrs, meanwhile, made hard-won buddies of a grizzled cop and a wily convicted criminal. There’s a naturally comic discord between Nick Nolte’s clenched gruffness and Eddie Murphy’s quicksilver irreverence, though the film’s upholding of law-and-order principles somewhat curbs its riotous potential.
Things can get funnier when you remove cops from the equation entirely: see Martin Brest’s breezy Midnight Run, pitting Robert De Niro’s aggro bounty hunter against Charles Grodin’s weaselly embezzler, or Shane Black’s fizzy 70s-noir pastiche The Nice Guys, in which Ryan Gosling’s PI and Russell Crowe’s enforcer reluctantly join forces on a case: they aren’t total opposites, but are seedy in competitively different, mutually amusing ways.
Or just focus on the criminals, as in Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, which mined generational and psychological conflict between Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s hitmen on tour, their connection shifting from circumstantial to surprisingly soulful. It pairs well with Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, which finds similar father-son undertones in the tough-love friendship between Clint Eastwood’s bank robber and Jeff Bridges’ car thief. One year before, Peter Bogdanovich also merged criminal and familial loyalties in the wonderful Paper Moon. The exact nature of the relationship between Ryan O’Neal’s Depression-era conman and daughter Tatum O’Neal’s sly, preteen sidekick is never exactly defined, but they’re nothing if not partners.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
A Complete Unknown
Fresh from a successful run in UK cinemas, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic is handsomely mounted, very well acted – particularly by rising star Monica Barbaro as a flinty Joan Baez – and smartly does most of its storytelling through the musical performances themselves. But it’s not especially poetic or rebellious, and thus never quite captures its subject’s spirit.
Hard Truths
After two historical dramas, it’s an invigorating thrill to see Mike Leigh back in present-day London, the milieu of all his best work – and reunited with Marianne Jean-Baptiste, whose scorching, profoundly wounded performance as a wife and mother consumed by anger at the outside world is as devastating as any in the Leigh canon. The director’s sense of the battle lines in everyday social intercourse remains the sharpest in British film.
Yojimbo/Sanjuro
(BFI) A 4K restoration of Akira Kurosawa’s brisk, exhilarating samurai western Yojimbo (1961) is paired in a box set with the film’s lesser-known sequel, Sanjuro (1962). Also centred on Toshiro Mifune’s wandering swordsman, the second film is a lighter, slighter affair, played mostly for laughs – a valuable curio.
Source: theguardian.com
