‘A Real Pain’ Is a Road Movie, a Buddy Comedy — and a Really Great Film, Period
You probably know someone like David: early 40s, has a steady job (selling internet ads), loves his wife and toddler son. He’s on meds but still anxiety-ridden, somehow seems both highly observant and perpetually distracted. Takes the responsibility of adulthood seriously. Very seriously. Maybe you’re related to that person. Maybe you are that person.
And you almost assuredly know someone like Benji: also early 40s, but no one seems to have told him he’s supposed to have grown up by now. The sort of person who can’t help but say what he’s thinking, can’t help but radiate life-of-the-party vibes, can’t help but be the most lovable fuck-up within a 50-mile radius. Refuses to kowtow to all that corporate-sponsored propaganda about “success.” He’s intimately familiar with his mom’s basement. On the plus side, he knows where to get some truly primo weed upstate.
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These are the two archetypes — a duo with an ant-and-grasshopper dynamic that would make Aesop slow-clap — that writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg presents to us in A Real Pain, a road movie that treads just enough off the beaten path to distinguish itself from a million other stories of mismatched traveling companions. Which is funny, given that the bulk of this extraordinary, character-driven dramedy about reconciliation, history, the legacy of tragedy, and that old chestnut about the past never being dead, etc., takes place on one of those group tours shepherded by a guide and scheduled down to the millisecond. David would appreciate the irony with a wry smirk. Benji would just punch you in the arm and tell you to live more in the moment before sneaking on to a hotel roof and lighting up a joint.
Not surprisingly, it’s David (Eisenberg) who’s booked this trip for him and Benji (Kieran Culkin). Once upon a time, these two cousins were extremely close. Now, David has his family and career in Brooklyn, and Benji is just ambling through life up in Bennington, New York. The latter has been especially unmoored since their grandmother Dory has passed away, since she was one of the few people he felt truly looked out for him. So his cousin organized an excursion to Poland to honor her, which will take these two back to the nana’s native country and culminate with them visiting the house where she grew up. It’s the perfect chance for these somewhat estranged relatives to get some quality time together again.
Time, of course, has only exacerbated the differences between these two men, and once they join the tour group led by a British scholar (The White Lotus‘ Will Sharpe) who never met a regional Jewish-experience footnote he didn’t love, the gap between the buttoned-up David and the kickin’-back-no-big-deal Benji becomes that much more pronounced. A Real Pain may double as a de facto travelogue for a long-lost version of Poland, one in which a world of pre-ghettoized Jewish neighborhoods has been paved over but not forgotten, as well as a checklist of its tributes and markers to a mass atrocity in the middle of the 20th century. But what it really focuses on is a far more personal history that hasn’t been shaped by a forcibly abandoned Motherland so much as shadowed by it. Both cousins find themselves connecting to their roots in unexpected ways, even as they acknowledge an alternate history in which they both grew up in Poland (“where we have long beards, and can’t talk to women”) that seems slightly unfathomable. It’s their connection to each other that seems more like ancient history to them now, especially when it comes to processing the gravitas of it all.
For David, that means a respectful sense of detachment, i.e., his usual modus operandi. For Benji, well … let’s just say he’s a lot. Eisenberg has generously gifted his costar with the sort of raging-id role that most actors could only dream of, and Culkin rewards his director/castmate with the single greatest, funniest, most cringe-comic and heartbreaking performance of his career — and yes, we are counting Roman Roy from Succession. His Benji is like a ball of pure, undiluted charisma, joyfully inquiring about strangers’ lives and leading his fellow tourists on a photo shoot in front of the Warsaw Uprising Monument. (David, naturally, is the one left taking pics on everyone’s phones.) That inner sunshine emanating out of him is what makes the occasional storm clouds of anger and flurry of blunt, blurted-out comments forgivable, if not entirely acceptable. The actor plays him as one part unfiltered holy fool, one part adorable puppy dog who pees on the rug. “I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, I want to be him,” Eisenberg’s character says at one point, and thanks to Culkin, you completely understand every single one of those impulses.
Culkin’s Zen-stoner take on a free spirit that’s also a broken spirit — an accidentally spilled bit of information hints at a backstory that suggests the film’s title is earned — would be enough to recommend this. But Eisenberg’s second time behind the camera also coronates him as a genuine filmmaker. His first movie, When You Finish Saving the World (2022), felt like the work of someone gingerly feeling their way around an art form. This sophomore effort as a writer-director is evidence of someone with an eye, an ear, and a voice. There’s a sense of moving the camera just enough to emphasize a detail, and framing a sequence in a way that suggests taking advantage of a backdrop, symmetry and/or space without seeming show-offy. That his work directing the film’s ensemble, which also includes Jennifer Gray, House of the Dragon‘s Kurt Egyiawan, David Oreskes, and Liza Sadovy, complements the film’s half-breezy, half-heavy tone isn’t a shock. That Eisenberg is savvy enough to abruptly end a sequence at the Majdanek concentration camp on a sudden gasp, then cut to an aftermath of quiet sobbing, is anything but expected.
A Real Pain ends on the same shot it begins on, with a wanderer at an airport, lost in his thoughts as the world moves around him. The second time is just as enigmatic as the first, and yet we now know these two cousins so well — and have heard their arguments and accusations, seen how incompatible they are, witnessed how their love for each other can’t close the chasm between their life choices — that what we read into that stare is massive. These two have just traveled hundreds of miles together, yet the healing can only be charted in inches. What Eisenberg accomplishes overall here, however, is beyond measure. It’s the real deal.
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