Movie Review: A Real Pain

By John Corrado

In A Real Pain, his sophomore feature as writer and director, actor Jesse Eisenberg crafts a sensitive, richly textured character study of two cousins reuniting for a Holocaust tour in Poland.

This unlikely premise paves the way for a dramedy that takes the bones of a mismatched buddy comedy, as Eisenberg graciously shares the screen with Kieran Culkin, delivering one of the year’s greatest supporting performances, and injects it with dramatic pathos.

Eisenberg is the strait-laced David Kaplan, and Culkin is his more free-wheeling cousin Benji. The two grew up together almost like brothers, but have grown somewhat estranged since David got married and had a kid, while Benji stayed somewhat stuck in place.

It’s this dynamic that underpins the film. Benji misses their nights spent getting high and hanging out around New York City. David has gotten into the routine of working and family life. The film opens with them reuniting at the airport, en route to Poland. Their beloved grandmother Dory has recently passed away. Grandma Dory was a Holocaust survivor, and they want to visit her old house and see where their Polish-Jewish family originated from before settling in America.

They have booked a Holocaust tour, led by the British tour guide James (Will Sharpe). Their travelling companions all have their own reasons for being on the tour. There’s the older Jewish couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), middle-aged divorcée Marcia (Jennifer Grey), and Jewish convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who embraced Judaism after fleeing the Rwandan genocide.

Eisenberg showed promise as a filmmaker in his debut feature When You Finish Saving the World, and A Real Pain builds on this potential. There is a confidence to how he lets every scene unfold, including in Michał Dymek’s cinematography and use of wide shots. Eisenberg’s brilliant screenplay is rich with dry humour (he has said that it was inspired by the absurdity of an online ad he saw advertising a Holocaust tour with lunch provided), but shot through with a deeper sense of poignancy as well.

The writing is filled with little nuances, inlcuding a searing, emotional monologue (masterfully delivered by Eisenberg) that snaps everything into sharper focus partway through. Eisenberg and Culkin nail the specific dynamic of playing cousins, with both actors each bringing their own unique characteristics to these roles. Culkin’s Benji is a ball of energy right from the moment we first meet him. But there is also a disarming sensitivity to his performance, that the character masks through his charismatic extroversion.

Benji is excited about everyone he meets, craving spontaneous interactions. Eisenberg’s David is socially anxious, and craves predictability and order. Eisenberg imbues him with his own neuroses, including nervous tics brought on by social anxiety. They couldn’t be more different, and we observe that David can get overwhelmed by Benji. But Eisenberg’s film skillfully captures all the ways that they can get under each other’s skin, while also caring deeply about each other.

Due to the subject matter, and backdrop of one of the darkest periods in history, A Real Pain could have felt saccharine or even offensive. But Eisenberg avoids all of this. There is a real sensitivity to the film’s exploration of grief and how different people process trauma, both immediate and in the past. The tour guide warns that the trip will get increasingly harder and more emotional as they approach visiting the concentration camps. It adds a rising tension to the film. In showing how this affects David and Benji differently, Eisenberg gets at something deeper about how the children and grandchildren of survivors continue to process the trauma of what their family members went through.

The film is short at barely ninety minutes, but every moment leaves an impact, whether funny or deeply moving. Through the supporting characters, Eisenberg captures that feeling of meeting new people and sharing meaningful but fleeting interactions that aren’t meant to last. We get just enough from each of them to suggest rich interior lives that we continue to think about. The film, too, lingers in the mind long after watching it, and really sticks with you. What a beautiful film.

Film Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)