However, there's good reason to believe the material might have some real-world resonance for one of the co-leads, Kieran Culkin, with regards to not his real cousin, but his real older brother.
Without really parsing the finer details of the history I can't say this for sure, but I suspect there is no way Kieran Culkin has a career if not for the path in Hollywood paved by his older brother Macaulay, two years his senior and the breakout star of Home Alone in 1990, the year Macaulay was turning 10 and Kieran 8. They're now 44 and 42.
Now, this may not be an entirely fair theory because Kieran was also in Home Alone. However, while that was Kieran's first role, it was Macaulay's seventh, including the prominent films Uncle Buck and Jacob's Ladder. There's little doubt that Macaulay was, initially, the star, and Kieran rode his coattails.
Nowadays, when we see Macaulay, we look at him with the sort of pity we reserve for a person whose career never really took off the way we expected it to, and whose life featured some hardships we would not wish on him. We probably shouldn't really pity him, as he has indeed continued to have professional work (though you might be hard-pressed to name it) and has also been in relationships with beautiful actresses (once Mila Kunis and now Brenda Song). Not that we should judge the success of a person's life by the attractiveness of his partners, but if we are already using the fairly superficial standard of the prominence of his professional work, that assessment is in the same qualitative boat.
Kieran? Well he's just one of the most respected actors of his age group working today, star of Succession and a number of high-profile films (including A Real Pain) that have earned him an endless number of breathless and deserved accolades from critics. And if we're remaining shallow, he's also married to a beautiful woman, she just doesn't happen to be otherwise famous.
I have to wonder what the nature is of Kieran's and Macaulay's relationship, though it might not be a simple binary dynamic since their acting family also includes the considerably younger Rory Culkin, who's only 35 and has had a successful career in his own right. I have to wonder if Macaulay is jealous of Kieran's success and is always thinking "You wouldn't be here without me," or if there are even jealousies in the other direction, in that Kieran may never have a role as iconic as Kevin McAllister no many how many awards he may one day win.
It mirrors the shifting relationship between David and Benji Kaplan in A Real Pain, where we are never sure which one has more reason to be jealous of the other, or which one is the real "pain" referenced in a title that is already playing double duty in that it's also alluding to the exploration of their Jewish heritage in Poland, including a visit to a concentration camp. It's one of the most successful aspects of a movie that surely did not work as well for me as it did for some people.
In the title of this post I referred to "nebo siblings," plural, and sure enough, I've got more where this came from.
A few years after Macaulay Culkin's prime, one of the next biggest child stars -- in other words, child stars whose names we knew beyond "that kid from that movie" --- was Dakota Fanning, whose big breakout was harder to pinpoint, though she was everywhere in the mid-2000s. I always think of her as showcasing her abilities most memorably in War of the Worlds in 2005.
Today? The Fanning you want to talk about is Elle, four years her sister's junior, whose craft is respected far and wide, and who seems to make only good decisions about the roles she takes. Meanwhile, Dakota is left with dubious crap like The Watchers, in which the abilities she once showed in a film with some thematic similarities, the aforementioned War of the Worlds, seem to have abandoned her entirely.
Then you have perhaps the most prominent example of this, where the younger sibling is on the A list and her older sisters are on the D or D- list. Twins Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen took the world by storm as the cute youngest daughter on Full House, a role they shared because that was a smart way to ensure you had one small child who was giving you usable material on any given day you were trying to shoot. (And something about child labor laws as well.) They became some of the first influencers as we now think of them, as well as tabloid mainstays. However, their own careers in TV and movies quickly petered out, and there to replace them was younger sister Elizabeth, three years their junior, who has morphed into one of the most recognizable actresses working in Hollywood with her role in the MCU and other high-profile projects. What's more, whereas they always seemed shallow and insipid, Elizabeth is the epitome of the kind of style and grace and glamour that they surely would have aspired to for themselves.
Then you have examples of actors who have achieved similar levels of fame, but the younger one is just so much more respected, at least as an actor, than the sibling whose work gave him the chance. Ben Affleck was appearing on screen for seven years before his younger brother Casey had his first role, and though it would be difficult to say that Casey has eclipsed him in terms of fame -- that's surely not the case -- Casey is far more lauded than his older brother as an actor. And though Ben has to be happy with all he's accomplished both in front of and behind the camera -- don't forget that a film he directed won best picture -- you know he wanted Casey's accolades as a performer, which include his own statue for best actor. Ben may have actually won this one, at least in the short term, as the #metoo related accusations against Casey have relegated him to less prominent roles in recent years, despite his evident ability. He's a bit of a James Franco in that way. (Though it hasn't stopped him from appearing in two of my #1 movies in the last decade.)
If this were the sort of post where I just kept on listing all the examples I could think of, I could probably come up with more. But I think four is a good place to stop for today.
The larger topic to chew on is just what it means for these people who have been eclipsed, for their psyche as actors and for their role as a supportive family member to their sibling. I think specifically here of Dakota Fanning, who was not just a famous face (like the older Culkin and the older Olsens) but actually considered sort of a phenom for her abilities as an actor, more like a Haley Joel Osment than a Culkin or Olsens. (And Osment might be an interesting inclusion in this post if there were any evidence to suggest his younger sister Emily -- the first siblings here to cross gender lines -- had actually eclipsed him in a meaningful way.) I have to think that Dakota feels an especial resentment toward the more talented Elle, because she appears to have done less than just tread water while her sibling swam ahead, if we are looking only at her abilities within the field that made her famous. She appears to have actually lost ground -- or started drowning, if we want to keep our metaphors in the water.
All this said, all the eclipsed siblings listed here are still working in some way. Even the Olsens, who officially retired from acting nearly 15 years ago, are still successful American businesswomen in the fashion industry, not has-beens living in a ramshackle apartment in Reseda, pining away for the fame and glory that once was.
If even someone as dubious as Pamela Anderson can be getting acting accolades from the critical community, don't count out any of these older siblings from one day rising up again and re-surpassing their younger nepo siblings.
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