Grief is a difficult subject for movies. It doesn’t tend to fit into a story arc, spiraling out instead into self-destructive coping mechanisms that defy a clear resolution. It can be amorphous yet persistent, even passing from generation to generation. And it’s a hard sell to holiday shoppers at the multiplex.
But films that grapple with all the messiness of grief can also be deeply cathartic. I watched two recent ones that are likely to show up on 2024 award ballots — one live-action, one animated.
Jesse Eisenberg, best known as the Oscar-nominated star of The Social Network, has been making waves as a writer-director. His second feature, A Real Pain (at the Savoy Theater in Montpelier and Majestic 10 in Williston at press time), is far from a vanity project. Though Eisenberg also stars, he’s given himself the “quiet” part, reacting throughout to a much showier performance by Kieran Culkin. Both show great skill, whether portraying emotional explosion or restraint.
The two play cousins who have drifted apart over the years: While David (Eisenberg) has a career and a family, Benji (Culkin) is still living in his mom’s basement and figuring life out. In the wake of their beloved grandmother’s death, the cousins travel together to Poland to visit her childhood home. First, however, they spend several days on a Jewish heritage tour helmed by a British gentile (Will Sharpe) whose smooth, self-conscious sensitivity rubs Benji the wrong way.
Benji has the kind of big, volatile personality that was made for sitcoms — he’s always stirring up excitement or conflict, as if terrified of boredom. It’s easy to imagine a broadly comic version of this movie in which we’d watch him transform the staid group into free spirits, sleeping with the attractive older widow (Jennifer Grey) and teaching the sober survivor of Rwandan genocide (Kurt Egyiawan) how to laugh again.
But A Real Pain is more drama than comedy. It forces us to look straight at Benji and recognize all the ways he hurts himself and others, even as he entertains them. As David tells him, “You light up a room, and then you shit on everything in it.”
The film is also a meticulous study of group dynamics and generational trauma. Comparing their hardworking Holocaust survivor grandmother to his aimless stoner cousin, David can’t fathom the disconnect. But Benji feels the weight of the past. When the group visits the Majdanek concentration camp, the music cuts out, and Benji’s chatter gives way to a prayerful silence. On the surface, A Real Pain might look like just an odd couple travelogue, but its currents run deep, and viewers may find themselves pondering its unresolved questions days later.
While A Real Pain faces grief with straightforward realism, Memoir of a Snail (rentable on various platforms) takes a whimsical route. The second feature from Australian Oscar winner Adam Elliot (Mary and Max), this R-rated stop-motion animation tells the colorful story of Grace Pudel (voiced by Charlotte Belsey as a child and Sarah Snook as an adult), who narrates.
Born with a cleft palate, motherless Grace is bullied at school but thrives at home with her paraplegic dad (Dominique Pinon) and twin brother, Gilbert (Mason Litsos and Kodi Smit-McPhee). The twins collect snails, and their pet of choice — safe in its shell from the cruel world — becomes Grace’s personal icon.
Then tragedy strikes, and Grace and Gilbert are packed off to foster families on opposite sides of the continent. While Grace finds a mentor in her octogenarian neighbor, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), Gilbert lives under the iron hand of evangelical orchardists who consider his very essence — arty, goth, gay — to be a sin. Once protected by her brother, Grace is now powerless to help him.
Memoir of a Snail hinges on simple value judgments: Art, freedom and weirdos are good; repression and patriarchy are bad. But the film’s retro style and setting (the 1970s) give an air of authenticity to its old-school progressive values. The paucity of dialogue keeps us focused on the visual storytelling. And the wonderfully bizarre, tactile animation creates a world that feels just removed enough from ours to be a fable, with a whiff of the earnest kids’ Claymation of the pre-digital era.
In press materials, Elliot says he wanted to celebrate the “lumps, bumps and imperfections” of clay, creating figures that look “as if made in a hurry or by someone who was drunk.” He succeeded. Memoir is the antidote to computer-animated blockbusters: Everything looks gritty, grimy, weathered or mossy, and you can almost feel the different textures.
The movie is full of deliciously random moments — as when Pinky’s dead husbands pop up in flashbacks, one of them voiced by Aussie musical icon Nick Cave. Elliot embraces a pack-rat aesthetic while acknowledging that clutter can also be a symptom of unprocessed trauma. As the adult Grace’s mental health deteriorates, her home becomes a hoarder haven, a metaphorical shell full of snail-themed tchotchkes. But Weaver’s Pinky is a cigar-chomping force of nature, and thanks to her influence, Grace eventually finds a path out of grief.
In both these movies, the older generation offers inspiration to sad, floundering young people. Benji in A Real Pain fondly recalls his grandmother’s gumption, although healing evades him. Grief isn’t something we can just purge and forget, these films suggest, but something we need to make our peace with, because it owes its existence to love.
This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2024.
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