Disney / Buena Vista
A Real Pain is amov small-cast, dramedy that feels like a throwback to films like Sideways or Garden State.
Written, directed, and starring Jesse Eisenberg and featuring a strong performance from Kieran Culkin the film deals in familiar themes for road films: men along a shared journey realizing how they’ve drifted apart and ultimately what brought them together in the first place.
Eisenberg plays David Kaplan, a Manhattan online advertising executive and family man with some serious social anxiety.
He’s going on a trip to their family’s ancestral home of Poland with his cousin, Benji (Culkin) to honor their recently deceased grandmother.
From the opening shots at the airport we see how the dynamic is going to work.
David is nervous to a fault; all bottled up anxiety and governed by a deep desire to get through what he’s set out to do with the least difficulty possible.
Benji is kind of male version of the old “manic pixie dream girl” character trope.
He’s charming, impulsive, and says what’s on his mind. David gets to the airport two hours early because he’s worried about missing the flight, but Benji gets there four hours early because he’s got nothing better to do and you meet “weird people” at the airport.
The cousins are on a “Remembrance Tour” focusing on the Jewish experience in Poland and the Holocaust.
The tour is led by James (Will Sharpe) a British guide who is clearly doing this because it’s the only way he can put his education in Eastern European history to work, rather than a personal connection. The tour brings out all the unspoken tension between the two men: Benji is emotionally real but disruptive, David is organized and pragmatic but harbors resentment towards Benji for a failed suicide attempt.
A Real Pain is well shot and carefully constructed at 90 minutes not to outstay its welcome. It is a profoundly middle class film with concerns about authenticity and purpose and what we owe to the past with an earnestness that you have to accept off the bat in order to enjoy what’s coming.
The Holocaust is a subject that’s been deeply mined for sentimentality over the years in Hollywood pictures, and I enjoy how this film lampshades some of those tropes.
I didn’t like the script for A Real Pain – I thought it was derivative, and it didn’t have the sense for detail or ruthless honesty it would need to say something new within the framework of this kind of picture. What saves the film is piercing and honest work from its two lead actors: Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, who remain committed throughout the film to really conveying the mixture of resentment and love that can develop between close family members as they begin to fall apart.
Culkin’s performance has gotten the vast majority of the notices, but I think Eisenberg is even more fearless. He’s so great at projecting how he’s swallowed so much pain over the years regarding Benji, and the scene where the tour group is fawning over him at dinner and he caustically tells the group about how he felt discovering Benji after his suicide attempt is one of the best scenes in any film in the last year.
The ending, to its credit, avoids easy platitudes and resolutions instead offering up the idea that sometimes the best we can do for those we love is offer up who we are as a counter balance and accept them in turn.
It’s a poignant message for a film starring two great actors working to find the balance between what we love in one another and what we feel like we’re owed.
This is a good film, especially if you’re in the mood for an actor’s showcase.
The only extra is a making-of featurette.
Recommended.
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