Eisenberg branches out in ‘Resistance,’ ‘Vivarium’
Both movies, in which Jesse Eisenberg plays two very different roles, opened Friday to digital, VOD releases.
When Jesse Eisenberg calls to talk about his two new movies, “Resistance” and “Vivarium,” he laughs and is quick to agree that the two films would make for a truly bizarre double feature.
In the World War II drama “Resistance,” Eisenberg plays the famed French mime Marcel Marceau as a young man working with the underground resistance against the Nazis who occupied his country.
In “Vivarium,” he plays Tom opposite Imogen Poots as his girlfriend Gemma, a young couple looking to buy a first home who find themselves trapped in a surrealistic nightmare of suburbia, parenthood, and madness.
Both movies open on Friday, March 27, digital and video-on-demand releases in these days of pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
Given that “Resistance” and “Vivarium” have absolutely nothing in common other than Eisenberg and the fact that they are, well, movies, we divided the interview to make sense of it all.
‘Resistance’
Like many people, Eisenberg knew Marcel Marceau as perhaps the most famous mime of all time, but had no idea that he’d worked with the underground after the occupation of France by Germany. But as he read the screenplay, and researched a bit more about the man and his life, he felt almost fated to play the part.
“There were so many strange coincidences,” Eisenberg says. “I grew up as the son of a clown. My mom wore the same makeup as Marcel Marceau and adored Marceau.
“Then when I started looking into him I realized that actually our family came from the same area of Poland, and we had also lost family at the same time in the war,” he says. (One his own cousins survived the war in Poland, hiding in the basement of a family who sheltered her, a story that inspired Eisenberg to write the 2013 play “The Revisionist” which starred Vanessa Redgrave as the cousin.)
But most appealing was the chance to play a man who used his art to help others, entertaining scared Jewish orphans smuggled into France from Germany, teaching them how to act in ways that would not draw the attention of the Nazis, using his talents as an actor to hide in plain sight while working in the resistance.
“The thing that’s stuck out to me the most was how this guy, who was this brilliant artist, found a way to use his work for the benefit of others,” Eisenberg says. “As opposed to kind of just performing art for its own sake, he was able to use it for this beautiful practical purpose, and in the most horrific times.
“It touched me so much as somebody who is a kind of artist,” he says. “I’m an artist, but I married an activist — my wife has been volunteering in her mother’s domestic violence shelter since she’s a kid, and been on the front lines of helping undocumented students in New York.
“I’m kind of always trying to reconcile the kind of indulgent work that I do with, I would say, the more benevolent work that she does. And that’s kind of the wonderful negotiation I saw in this movie.”
As for why this chapter in Marceau’s life isn’t better known, Eisenberg says he was surprised at first, but then came to a sense of understanding about why he wouldn’t have talked more about it.
“I suspect there was a feeling of humility, that he didn’t want to kind of appear like a hero when there were so many other people doing heroic things that received no attention, because they weren’t as well-known as he was,” he says. “I think he also probably wanted to be seen as an artist and didn’t want to distract from that.”
To prepare for the role, Eisenberg worked for nine months with the mime Lorin Eric Salm, who trained with Marceau before his death in 2007.
“He not only choreographed these incredible routines in the movie but also worked with me to kind of make them my own, and make it feel like it would be for Marceau starting out,” he says. “So that it felt like if you know Marceau’s work you could recognize that this would be kind of an early version of him developing it.”
In the end, “Resistance” left Eisenberg with a newfound appreciation for an oft-maligned art.
“My work as an actor and writer, there’s always emphasis on what’s literal about performing,” he says. “You hope that success comes from the audience understanding exactly what it is that you’re intending.
“With mime, they embrace what’s abstract about performance. It’s the difference between a kind of realistic depiction or a kind of impressionistic depiction. And it brings with it a certain kind of artfulness that a literal acting performance misses.”
‘Vivarium’
In “Vivarium,” a young couple played by Eisenberg and Imogen Poots follow an odd real estate agent to the new planned development of Yonder where identical houses on identical streets make them laugh at the weirdness at first, and then freak out at the madness that soon follows.
It’s an unsettling thriller, a nightmare in a dream home, and when a baby is delivered to the door with instructions that they raise him, things get weirder still.
“I just loved that it took this kind of premise of an almost-‘Twilight Zone’ situation or a ‘Black Mirror’ situation and turns it into this brilliant fever dream,” he says of his initial response to the screenplay. “So rather than being a kind of obvious commentary on the monotony of the suburbs or the difficulties of child-rearing it takes these symbols and turns it into the kind of anxious dream you’d have the night before you got married or bought a house or had a baby.
“So it spoke to me and it spoke to the unconscious part of the brain,” Eisenberg says. “In college, I studied Man Ray and Luis Buñuel and what we studied is how these surrealist filmmakers would use symbols to evoke fears that we have unconsciously, rather than kind of just depicting the literal circumstances.
“And so I just thought this was a brilliant example of a surrealist movie that spoke to real fears, and it was done in an artful way rather than a kind of horror movie way.”
Unlike “Resistance,” which was filmed on locations, “Vivarium” was shot almost entirely on sets built on sound stages, which with the small cast — Eisenberg, Poots, and three different actors who play the child they are given — added to its play-like character.
“I kind of did feel this very claustrophobic thing,” he says. “It’s interesting now that we’re kind of all literally quarantining ourselves — that’s what these characters are kind of forced into doing.
“I think the movie now will be filtered through everybody’s incredibly unusual experience right now, which is that, you know, we’re kind of isolated and probably often going stir crazy — kind of what happens to the characters in the movie.”