This past weekend was a rare, double-feature weekend for me.  First up was The Outrun, which tells the story of a recovering alcoholic trying to make-do in the Orkney Islands.  The lead, Rona, is played by Saoirse Ronan, whose life is told in jarring-but-effective flashbacks involving both family and friends.  She is a sympathetic character, one whose pain and suffering and frustration you can feel. It’s an incomplete story, of course, but aren’t they all?

The second movie was A Real Pain starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, who play estranged cousins traveling to Warsaw, Poland to honor their recently-deceased grandmother.  In its own way, A Real Pain is the more difficult story to watch as there are some genuinely funny moments that make the difficult moments that much more potent.  Eisenberg plays the responsible, no-nonsense cousin while Culkin plays the wildly frustrating-yet-inspiring one.  Both character get a chance to shine in the story.

A Real Pain tells a kind of full-circle story, with opening and closing shots taking place in a busy airport, where Culkin’s character enjoys getting to know those around him.  But what you feel at the end isn’t quite the same sensation that you hade with the opening scene.  A Real Pain, it turns out, has at least two meanings: one obvious, one less so.  It’s the double-meaning that stays with you as the credits roll.

There’s also the sense of a double-meaning in the title of The Outrun.  I didn’t see a trailer prior to watching the movie, I just knew it was a chance to see a movie about recovery.  “The Outrun” is only mentioned once in the script, when Rona’s father tells her that some things need to be taken care of on their farm in a location called the outrun.  The Dictionaries of the Scots Language gave me some illumination on an exact definition- turns out there are two,  First, an outrun is “a piece of outlying grazing land on an arable farm” that can, by extension be understood as “an exposed part of the body, one of the extremities.”  Both seem fitting for the story.

Not the happiest time at the movies, obviously, but both movies told good stories with beautiful moments.  I recommend them both.