Film review: A Real Pain
Two mismatched American cousins with shared Jewish heritage and an acute sensitivity to the world embark on a road trip taking in Polish Holocaust memorials in this witty and affecting film.
Two Jewish cousins who were once as close as brothers meet at the airport for a trip to Poland in honour of their grandmother who, “thanks to a thousand miracles”, survived the Holocaust. They join a tour group and plan to break off on the last day to seek out their grandmother’s old house.
It sounds like an odd-couple road trip that will end, by convention, with the two parting as best buddies, but A Real Pain is a much more finessed and startling film. It also cements Jesse Eisenberg – who wrote, produced, directed and stars in it – as a cool and untarnished Woody Allen for a new generation, channelling millennial angst.
His persona as David Kaplan is recognisably the Eisenberg who first made his name in 2010 in The Social Network: perpetually anxious, a rapid-fire thinker, sensitive, neurotic and myopic. He makes banner ads that pop up on the internet, he loves his wife, and Facetimes with his adorable son who is obsessed with how many floors there are in various New York skyscrapers.
David is shouting his cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), on the Poland trip to share a family experience and also to check up on him after some recent hinted-at trouble. The movie opens with David neurotically unravelling over a string of phone messages plotting his progress to the airport and providing Benji with traffic-flow advisories, only to find Benji has been there for hours.
David is uptight and Benji is relaxed, charming and at ease with everyone he meets. He is also smuggling weed into Poland, which says a lot.
They join the tour, which will be necessarily emotional, but the film also puzzles over how to appropriately respond to memorial sites that are tied to Hitler’s genocidal murder of millions of Jews. The culmination of the trip will be a visit to the death chambers of Majdanek, their walls still stained blue from a component in the gas.
The mood between the cousins ebbs and flows, and they niggle away trying to curb each other’s excesses. They are from the same sensitive stock but how they negotiate their way through the world is what this very touching, observational film is about. In one uncomfortably amusing scene, Benji leaps onto a massive Polish commemoration sculpture and asks David to photograph him in a series of silly poses. David is appalled at Benji’s bad taste, as are the others, at first. But one by one they join him, consigning David to be the photographer on multiple phones while the others bond and laugh with Benji.
As a writer and director, Eisenberg digs deep. Benji is so horrified at the ethics of travelling first-class in a train to visit Holocaust sites that he moves to the back of the train, and David, embarrassed and apologetic to the others, has to go, too. But it’s Benji who makes real connections in the group, particularly with the divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey), whose raw pain he can feel. He also makes his mark on the sweetly well-meaning tour guide, James (Will Sharpe from The White Lotus), who he attacks for spouting facts about memorials but not including any real people.
The performances of Eisenberg and Culkin elevate A Real Pain way above the base material of concept and script, and the piano soundtrack of Chopin music sets the reflective tone.
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Culkin, known and loved for his performance as the anarchic, wisecracking Roman Roy in the TV series Succession, shifts gears to craft a character more troubled, honest and real who is likeable and gifted in the way he finds magic where others miss it. He drags David up onto rooftops he would never dare climb and makes him think in ways he never would; the two of them walk together through the horror camp in bowed and tortured silence.
The ending is equivocal, which is all it can be. Eisenberg’s inquisitive, nuanced character study of two Jewish cousins explores pain that is personal and generational, and not the kind of thing a trip to Poland can fix.
A Real Pain is in cinemas from December 26.