A Real Pain comes to us from producer Jesse Eisenberg, here making his writing/directing feature debut, courtesy of fellow producer Emma Stone. It’s a movie about a couple of Jewish cousins from New York, flying out to Poland to take a Holocaust tour and reconnect with their roots. Not a complicated premise. So let’s move on to the lead characters.
I’ve heard it said that there are two kinds of people: There are those who see a door that says “WARNING! STAY OUT! THIS MEANS YOU!” and instinctively steer clear of whatever the hell is behind that door. And then there are those who see the exact same door and eagerly barrel right through to see what happens. David (Eisenberg) is the former. Benji (Kieran Culkin) is the latter. And I’m not exaggerating, that literally happens in the movie.
David and Benji were inseparable as children, but drifted apart as David got a job and a wife and an adorable young son, while Benji… well, didn’t. The two reconnected after the recent death of their grandmother, who was lucky enough to escape the Holocaust. She left the boys a bit of money to go to Poland and here we are.
David is the neurotic straight man, well within Eisenberg’s established wheelhouse. Likewise, Kieran Culkin is capably playing to his strengths as a mercurial trickster who unpredictably fluctuates between “stoner slacker” and “toxic asshole”. These are time-honored archetypes played by two seasoned actors, and their interplay successfully powers the movie.
To repeat, it’s not a complicated premise. These are not complicated characters and this isn’t a complicated plot. Nothing about this story is particularly big or complex. But it deals with a lot of big and complex emotions.
For instance, consider that Benji has absolutely zero brain-to-mouth filter, proudly wearing his heart on his sleeve. And he’s the grandson of a Holocaust survivor. And he’s on a Holocaust tour. Yeah, things get messy pretty darn fast whenever he’s involved.
As for David, he’s not very good at socializing or going outside his comfort zone. As the film unfolds, we gradually learn — whether he knows it or not — that David has dealt with the traumas and pressures of the world by bottling all those emotions up. And if he’s ever going to learn how to deal with those emotions in a healthy way, a Holocaust tour is the place to do it.
In ways both large and small, this movie has a lot to say about reconciling the past and present. My favorite example concerns a montage of a Polish neighborhood, showing different sites within the neighborhood as is while a voice-over tells us what each site used to be. It’s a fascinating visual demonstration of how time marches on and things change, but traces of the past still linger. You know, like trauma.
David and Benji aren’t just sorting through their connection to all those killed in the Holocaust, they’re sorting through their connection with their late grandmother and with each other. There’s still pain and grief from the loss of their beloved grandmother, but there’s also pain and grief for the connection they used to have when they were practically brothers. But now Benji is jealous because David has a stable life with a wife and kid; while David is jealous of Benji’s independence and his innate ability to make the whole world revolve around him through sheer force of charm. It’s the classic scenario in which each one is jealous of what the other has. But it works here, in large part because both are portrayed as different outcomes of a life shaped by trauma.
As the title implies, this is a movie quite heavily focused on pain. In this crazy mixed-up world, each and every one of us needs to find our own way of dealing with the pain happening all around us, and the suffering that our modern world was built upon. There’s no right way of dealing with that, as David and Benji demonstrate two extremely different coping mechanisms. But they also demonstrate that getting through it with company makes the process a lot easier.
A Real Pain is a peculiar little movie. There are no real twists, there’s no climax to build towards, the characters are stock archetypes, and the stakes are practically nil. The near-absence of plot will likely turn away a lot of less patient viewers.
Even so, the two lead performances are marvelous, and the film maintains a quirky kind of comedic charm. More importantly, I found it genuinely fascinating to take what was basically a cinematic Holocaust tour with dramatized commentary from Eisenberg. There’s a strong impression that Eisenberg made this film as a means of processing his own ancestral baggage, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that. Moreover, after seeing so many debut directors crash and burn for reaching too far beyond their grasp, I can respect a debut director who plays to his established strengths and works with what he knows, but in a different capacity.
Is it worth seeing? Absolutely. Is it worth seeing on the big screen? That’s a tougher question. Yes, the views of Poland are breathtaking on the big screen, most especially during the tour of the concentration camp. Even so, this is such a deeply personal and intimate film that I don’t think you’d miss much waiting for a home viewing.