A Real Pain is a real success for Eisenberg
If you loved Kieran Culkin as the brutally honest but sensitive Roman Roy in Succession, you’re bound to enjoy his work in A Real Pain. As Benji in Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, Culkin creates a similar character whose lack of social filters and often inappropriate bluntness masks deep empathy and pain. Eisenberg also co-stars as Benji’s more buttoned up cousin, David. The duo’s performances help make A Real Pain one of the year’s best films.
The film’s title works on multiple levels, and is a clue to the picture’s themes. Benji, reckless, forthright, and up for anything, can be a “real pain,” especially for David, who both envies Benji’s fearlessness and resents the messiness he often leaves in his wake. But real, legitimate pain underscores Benji’s persona, and real, legitimate pain exists in the world. How do we process such pain and trauma, individually, collectively, and generationally? With his film’s premise, writer/director Eisenberg finds the perfect way to explore this question: the two Jewish cousins join a Holocaust group tour in Poland to honor their recently deceased Polish-born grandmother, to whom Benji was particularly close.
Led by the non-Jewish, academic British tour guide James (Will Sharpe, of the Italian-set White Lotus), the tour, which includes a somber day visiting the Majdanek concentration camp in Lubin, becomes a catalyst for Benji and David to hash out their conflicts, examine their family’s legacy, and contemplate their own futures. While the themes are weighty, Eisenberg as a writer and director smartly realizes that pathos lends itself to humor. Eisenberg and Culkin’s rapport as cousins who share a long history and know how to push each other’s buttons yields some honest laughs that feel just as natural and real as the film’s more serious moments.
The supporting cast, too–especially Kurt Egyiawan as a Jewish convert and Rwandan genocide survivor, and a nearly unrecognizable Jennifer Grey as a new divorcée–each create authentic characters that become more than simple backdrops for the two leads. Filmmaker Eisenberg knows how to showcase his actors’ strengths, and his film is filled with scenes that are thoughtful and emotionally resonant. And as an actor, Eisenberg gives one of his best performances since The Social Network. A scene in a restaurant in which David expresses his complicated feelings about his cousin to the tour group will no doubt be the clip played at the various acting award ceremonies to which Eisenberg is bound to be invited.
“We cut ourselves off from everyone in pain,” Benji says at one point. Eisenberg’s film shows us the dangers of doing that, and underscores how confronting trauma–our own, and others’–while not always easy or comfortable, is always the first step on a journey toward healing. We are more resilient than we realize, and this introspective, compassionate picture lets us see that without being heavy handed or preachy. Don’t miss it.
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A Real Pain is now playing in theaters.
