The perfect film for anyone who’s ever pondered the existence of a gift shop at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is consumed with performative contemplation, introspection scheduled around lunch breaks and photo opps, and what it means to grapple with your own discontent in a world of pervasive suffering. It’s also a squirmy bit of self-excoriation operating under the guise of buddy comedy and travelogue, interrogating a form of privilege that’s rarely explored at length in American films: specifically, the entire notion of mental health and happiness which, the film implicitly argues, are luxuries of circumstance and surroundings. However, if you compare anything to an actual atrocity it’s going to seem picayune. That your problems might be small potatoes in the grand scheme of things doesn’t make them any less your problems. A Real Pain is perceptive enough to recognize the kind of self-involved behavior we’re all guilty of on some level without reducing it to lazy punchlines. Is it a teeny bit tasteless to use the specter of the Holocaust to explore the discontent of myopic Americans struggling to wrap their heads around how good they have it? Perhaps, but no more so than getting caught up in the adventures of two young lovers who discover one another aboard the Titanic. But then, the compartmentalization is very much the text with this one.
Eisenberg (who also wrote the film’s screenplay) stars as David, a tightly wound Manhattanite embarking on a week-long trip to Poland with his somewhat estranged cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin). The two men were practically raised as brothers, but, as often happens, their lives have taken them on different paths in adulthood: David has a successful but terminally uncool job in online media sales as well as a wife and young son; Benji just kind of loafs around in upstate New York, never having reached any of the typical benchmarks of maturity (i.e., job, family, moving out of mom’s basement). The trip is meant to commemorate the passing of the two men’s beloved grandmother; both to visit their ancestral home and tour the concentration camp that grandma survived, which, in the process, allowed for their eventual births. The dynamic between the Kaplan boys isn’t quite Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, but a shorthand of sorts does emerge: David is an over-planner, compulsively leaving voicemails for Benji that offer up unsolicited advice on how to get to the airport on time while, in reality, his cousin has already been at JFK for hours, taking the opportunity to people watch and make friends with the TSA agents. Benji has little feel for propriety or social cues, as though there were no filter between brain and mouth, yet his boorishness is downstream of how attuned he is to his own messy feelings. There’s a directness to the character which is bracing but also a little enviable, particularly for someone like David who seems to be constantly walking on eggshells. Or as David describes his cousin, “you’re like an awesome guy stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late.”
Upon landing in Poland, the two men check in to their luxury hotel — Benji even shipped himself a brick of primo-grade cannabis in advance so it’s already waiting for him at the front desk; kind of an ingenious idea, really — and meet up with the small tour group they’ll be spending most of the trip with. Led by British tour guide James (Will Sharpe) who, while technically a gentile, still waxes rhapsodic about the nobility of Jewish culture, the group is made up of flirty divorcée Marsha (Jennifer Grey, in an inspired bit of meta-casting in light of her being best known these days for formerly possessing an “ethnic-looking” nose), affluent retirees Diane and Mark (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism after immigrating to Winnipeg. Benji immediately ingratiates himself to his fellow travelers despite referring to them as a “geriatric tour group” and oversharing (he’s still taking grandma’s death a year ago awfully hard) while David can only look on with equal parts embarrassment and envy. Truth be told, it can be difficult to get a feel for what exactly Benji’s “deal” is. The film is a little too prone to treating the character like a writer’s device, swinging manically between gregarious empath — the sort of person who sees someone walking by themselves and feels the need to run over to them to make sure they’re doing okay — and childlike vulgarian. Benji spits out pithy burns such as “money is like heroin for boring people,” which sounds clever until you realize how utterly tone deaf it is as he depends on the largesse of others to survive (it’s also worth noting that the person he says this to is living rather comfortably themselves and is too polite to ask him to elaborate on the statement). And yet the character is genuinely curious and emotionally present in a way that feels alien to the more “together” and constrained David, who declares without irony that “there’s a time and a place to grieve” while on a guided tour of the Holocaust.
At times Culkin seems to be serving as a foul-mouthed catalyst for Eisenberg to interrogate what we in the 21st society do and do not hold sacred, vis-à-vis the “touristification” of human misery (and lest one get on too high a horse about strolling through the Warsaw ghetto or Majdanek, ask yourself if you’ve ever taken a school trip to Gettysburg or maybe done a Jack the Ripper walking tour). Benji’s discomfort at sitting in the first class compartment of a train barreling toward a concentration camp is as understandable as it is incoherent (as Mark astutely inquires, is there somehow more integrity in making the trip in a slightly less plush seat further down the car?). That Benji — as well as the film — doesn’t have an especially well-organized worldview when it comes to this sort of thing speaks to the film’s playfulness and willingness to work through its own complicated feelings as it moves along. The film stages a cringeworthy confrontation at an old Jewish cemetery where tour guide James prattles on incessantly, leading Benji to tell him to kindly cram it with the factoids. The character may be an asshole — and, as evidence of this, when James actually compliments Benji for the constructive feedback a few days after the incident, the latter can barely recall the fraught exchange — but he’s not exactly wrong either, and there’s a clumsy integrity in wanting (nay, insisting) on silent observance that one is standing on sacred ground. It’s a moment that’s echoed later on in the film, when our group finally arrives at Majdanek and, after more than an hour of wall-to-wall chatter, Eisenberg allows the hushed reverence the camp inspires to ring out as the characters walk the grounds.
Eisenberg’s previous film as a director, 2022’s little-seen When You Finish Saving the World, similarly twisted itself into intellectual knots, treating the hypocrisies and incentive structures behind altruism and kindness the way a child with a magnifying glass would an anthill. The two films share a probing quality; both a willingness to draw (metaphorical) blood and an aversion to cheap sentimentality. But A Real Pain is a far less scornful film and has genuine affection for its characters, screwed-up and incomplete though they may be. There is an overdetermined quality to the film’s writing — the presence of former refugee Eloge in the group feels rhetorical more than anything else — but also a canny recognition of the value of traditions and gestures (futile and otherwise) in connecting us to our pasts. For example, the characters struggle to explain the significance of the Jewish tradition of leaving a rock on a tombstone other than it feels “right”; sometimes merely acknowledging our shared humanity and that we’re occupying the same physical space is meaning enough. After all, telling someone “God bless you” after they sneeze doesn’t actually do anything, but both of you would feel a little uncomfortable if you’d said nothing.
DIRECTOR: Jesse Eisenberg; CAST: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey; DISTRIBUTOR: Searchlight Pictures; IN THEATERS: November 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 29 min.
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