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.
This self-righteous, overbearing behavior comes somewhat out of nowhere. Benji begins the tour exhibiting benign, friendly quirkiness until he suddenly decides to take a stand for the dead. It seems to emerge as projection from the closeness he shared with his dead grandmother and the conflicting feelings that arise as he tours the land where people like him were murdered, which escalates in the build-up to the concentration camp tour. Benji suddenly feels as though it’s his duty to speak for those who can’t speak, to do his version of white guilt but for his own people. Yet, on the surface, Benji continues to act like a kid in a candy store, sneaking to a rooftop to smoke weed with David after referring to a Polish doorman as “Blork,” or taking over piano-playing duties at a Jewish-owned restaurant he deems to be peddling in “anti-Semitic music,” or slipping into a train’s first-class section for free (which sits right with his soul). He’s also insistent on wearing pajamas everywhere.
Benji’s generational trauma is selective, almost performative, but understandable. Seeing the film’s concentration camp is difficult, and no less powerful than if one were standing there in person to see the stains left by the gas and the floor-to-ceiling mounds of orphaned shoes. As a Jewish person, there is guilt from witnessing physical proof of the souls who didn’t make it, while your own ancestors somehow did, paving the way for your very existence, spent taking comfort for granted.
The intensifying dynamic between Benji and David works well for their actors; Eisenberg and Culkin are a perfect, no-brainer match for foils. Culkin (who excels as something of a manic pixie dream boy) is great at hassling demure characters like a trickster god, and Eisenberg is great at being hassled while suppressing rage. Their relationship shifts and alters like that of siblings; one minute they’re stoned and enraptured by their hotel TV’s menu page, the next they’re deploying passive-aggressive barbs at one another. Eisenberg and Culkin sustain the film with a playful rapport that perpetually shudders with an undercurrent of pent-up bitterness, until it more or less explodes, and the two actors, in their respective ruts, are well-suited for a biting, amusing odd-couple dynamic.
In spite of (or perhaps, necessarily due to) the sensitive topics that A Real Pain wrestles with, it’s a buoyant, funny film. Eisenberg’s screenplay deploys the right kind of wry, subtle humor at the right moments, and gut-wrenching heartache in others. On the other hand, there is not much formal daring to Eisenberg’s direction, though the evolution of the on-screen relationship between Benji and David isn’t really in need of flashy camerawork. Maybe Eisenberg is aware of his stylistic limitations, or maybe he’s more interested in softer, more personal filmmaking. A Real Pain suffers from some of the same issues as When You Finish Saving The World, in that Eisenberg shackles him to a low-key style of filmmaking and storytelling that doesn't allow his work to stand out from countless other small, personal indie films about families with problems. Still, A Real Pain ends not with the cousins making promises to repair their relationship—as a lesser film might have—but something slightly more cynical. There is no simple catharsis to reckoning the horrors of the past with the eases of the present day; all you can do is choose how to live with it, and Eisenberg’s refusal to wrap his film in a neat little bow elevates his sophomore film into something almost as difficult as its subject material.
Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Writer: Jesse Eisenberg
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan
Release Date: November 1, 2024
