Family hurt runs deep in charming, sensitive two-hander A Real Pain
Jesse Eisenberg's sophomore film finds balance between its sensitive Holocaust tour narrative and odd-couple comedy with Kieran Culkin.
Photo: Searchlight Pictures
David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins, practically brothers, but they couldn’t be less alike—because of course they couldn’t be. And while the characters are foils for one another, they aren’t for the actors portraying them. Both leads of Eisenberg’s sophomore directorial effort, A Real Pain, are familiar, and typecast each actor. Benji is a freewheeling eccentric, volatile but good-hearted and honest, Culkin doing a substantially less evil iteration of his portrayal of Roman Roy on Succession. David is successful and stable but guarded, repressed, and insecure. Eisenberg—who also penned the screenplay—understands his strengths, and gives himself the same type of character he’s been playing for the past 15 years. A Real Pain is a similarly recognizable film, the exact kind of stripped-down yet poignant indie dramedy, centered on a troubled familial dynamic, that rightfully charms audiences at Sundance.
But A Real Pain is not necessarily as slight as that sounds, and it’s a marked improvement from Eisenberg’s debut, When You Finish Saving The World, back in 2022, which felt much more like your standard “Sundance film” (derogatory). In A Real Pain, Eisenberg swaps out a suburban mother and her YouTuber son struggling to bond for two Jewish cousins, grappling with the loss of their grandmother and looking to reconnect with their roots in Poland. It’s much heavier subject material, but Eisenberg tackles it with a light, if not particularly ambitious touch, working in familiar territory until concluding on a refreshingly ambiguous note.
David and Benji travel to Warsaw in search of their own history, joining a Holocaust tour that becomes progressively more tense as Benji finds himself emotionally tormented by his own privilege in contrast with the oppression of his ancestors. The tour group consists of guide James (Will Sharpe), Rwandan genocide survivor and Jewish convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Grey, in a role that doesn’t give her very much to do), and an older married couple.
The group is led through Warsaw and through neighboring towns, as James—a Brit and not Jewish himself, but a history nerd—expounds upon the significance of various monuments and locales, eventually leading to the site of a concentration camp. Along the way, David and Benji’s relationship is tested. The cousins, once very close, both live in New York; David in the city, in a beautiful brownstone with a wife and daughter, Benji still struggling nearby in Binghamton. Each wants a little of what the other has, although David is the only one to outright articulate it. As emotional and erratic as Benji is, he is more eager to keep things close to his heart—probably what led him, in part, to quietly overdose on sleeping pills and just nearly avoid a successful suicide. David resents Benji for having a personality he craves while being so ungrateful for it that he’d attempt to kill himself. Benji resents David for forgetting about him, but seems to hold even more resentment for the creature comforts of the 21st century that his kin did not get to experience. He admonishes money as heroin for the rich, makes a spectacle of giving up his first-class train seat for the back of the train (citing the crowded trains which herded Jews to the camps), and criticizes James for over-emphasizing dry facts and figures.