Cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) travel to Poland with money left behind after their grandmother passed away to see the town where she grew up and the concentration camp which she survived as a way of honoring her legacy.  The two young men, each living vastly different lifestyles, react to the places and events on the tour in vastly different ways.  As the tour continues, the two cousins have never seemed farther apart, but when they find their grandmother’s childhood home that she was forced to flee, the ties of family have never felt so strong. 

Jesse Eisenberg delivers A Real Pain, his sophomore effort as writer/director.  Debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, Searchlight distributed the acclaimed film which won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award in its first festival ahead of a month’s long run culminating in a moderate theatrical release.  Confined to an even 90 minutes, and only a few brief days in “story time,” the film is determined to – and wastes no time in – digging into the deeper themes of grief and legacy, not in any major grandstanding way, but in the quieter and more personal realms of our own family histories. 

While Eisenberg is the multi-credited one of the pair of leads – writer, director, star, and producer – Culkin’s Benji is the more attention drawing performance against the more stick-in-the-mud David.  Like two sides of a miss-struck coin, the two cousins are so similar in their upbringing that they have developed into two totally different people in how they interact and interpret the world.  It makes for an odd-couple comedy, tangentially set behind the backdrop of an Eastern European Holocaust tour with enough distance from the harrowing memorials that the comedy does not feel wholly distasteful, but the appropriately reverent tone which the filmmaking adopts when the tour group reaches Majdanek is jarring on a narrative level.  It offers one of the only moments of stillness in the otherwise frenetically paced story. Lately, filmmakers have been getting a little cheeky in their representations of the Holocaust and its memorials, be it the first kiss between ill-fated teens in Josh Boone’s The Fault in Our Stars (2014) or Julia von Heinz using the memorials to inspire her encroaching-on-middle-aged, divorced, and melancholic heroine to better herself in Treasure (2024), so it is understandable that audiences’ preconceptions and apprehensions ahead of A Real Pain are not totally abated, especially given Benji’s antics in the first act.  While still a drastically different film than Jonathan Glazer‘s Zone of Interest (2023), Eisenberg similarly lets the immensity of the locations and the building speak for themselves when the group reaches the camp.

Benji is the key to unlocking the film, though, and with our guard up around him, Culkin has no easy task.  He is mostly successful at worming his way into our hearts and earning our empathy with the help of seeing how his tour group have opened themselves to him, albeit the almost immediate ingratiation he finds from his companions is nothing short of incredible to the point of bending our own credulity.  Unfortunately, the expanded cast do not offer much to the narrative beyond allowing Benji a chance to grandstand his offbeat, perfectly tunes, counter view of the world.  Surrounded by these gateways to his own monologues, the bold and brash performance style adopted by Culkin raises questions about if he is simply overacting or if Eisenberg’s intention is lost through his direction, unable to articulate a more nuanced idea for Benji into being.  It is frustrating because there are moments where the script allows Benji to bring up some important and insightful ideas, like what it means to be a descendent of a Holocaust survivor riding first class on a train through Poland, but Eisenberg is too afraid to belabor the point that the thesis of the film becomes something akin to observational philosophy.  It may not have been Eisenberg’s ultimate goal, but he also scratches at the almost commodification of tragedy, again, only to tuck tail and flee.   

A Real Pain never answers any of these questions it raises because the film transitions into something like David’s too-little-too-late journey of self-discovery that is too amorphous to even pin down.  There is always talk of a wife and family back home, and a job that keeps him busy, and while we understand he changed – presumably for the better, having learned some vague lesson from Benji – it feels unearned.  Eisenberg’s script is either too weak or too scared to interrogate anything or to mine any new revelations or understanding from what we see on screen.  It is passingly enjoyable in the moment, but nothing builds upon itself as we watch these two varyingly unhappy people bump and bustle against each other, there is never the catalyst that will either bring them back together or irreparably rip them apart.  David comes close while he describes his fraught relationship with Benji, how he feels he is wasting his life and legacy, and his suicidal tendencies in a powerful scene, but it really just reveals David’s latent narcissism. So often is life, but if cinema is a chance to escape those doldrums, this film is unsuccessful in presenting an idealized world and if cinema is a chance to glean meaning from life, this film is dangerously close to being vapid.  Thankfully, the film is not too smug about itself, almost as if it is self-aware enough to realize that it has so little to actually say.   

The major flaw at play here is that Eisenberg allows David to get off easy, to learn the lessons simply without having to do the work or to toil as he resigns Benji to do.  He returns back to his life in New York, his wife and his family and his job and a stone – a sentimental souvenir that he will inevitably kick off the porch in his hurry to the office within a week.  Meanwhile, Benji sits alone in the crowded airport having politely declined an offer only extended to him only as a requisite for being family briefly reunited for what may be the last time until the next funeral.  It is a reunion that ended in a breakup, but unlike the odd-couple romcoms which the film is half emulating, there is no third act that brings them back together.  There is no sweeping gesture that reclarifies all previous misunderstandings.  To do so would feel cheap given the subject matter and overall tone, but to end it here feels unbalanced because David is just as much of an ingenuine person in the beginning of the film than he is in the end.  There is no arc, and even for Benji, his crucible did not lead to anything new or striking. Since the film is seen through David’s perspective, we always have this apprehension around Benji, and after learning more about him and his contrived troubled past that is all left hanging there while David does the bare minimum and can return home a hero is off-putting, as if Eisenberg grew scared of discovering something real in the writing process and quickly retreated from it. So often is the case in real life, but Eisenberg fills the world of this film with characters so clearly designed for their indie-quirks that we believe – and subconsciously demand – something more of a formal resolution.   

Through all of this, though, the heart and the good intention shines through, even though Eisenberg may had strayed far from the path he seemed to have set out on. It is a film that is easy to recommend and mostly easy to watch in that it does not demand crucial attention which is important since oftentimes Culkin’s extended outbursts make it easy to look away or let the mind wander; a symptom of our own societal politeness when witnessing an outburst in public.  Again, Eisenberg is not really interested in exploring why we hide our feelings, but instead chooses to look on at Benji with a soft disdain even though he is reacting appropriately to an extreme situation which David has placed him in. Ultimately, the film is too sloppy to say that Eisenburg had shown surgical precision in striking the nerves, but he at least came to the project armed with a sharp scalpel and a general idea of where to cut so the broader concepts which he was trying to explore do come through.  The result, however, is just another example of an artist too woven into the work that holds the narrative back.  Had Eisenberg not had to direct himself and worry about his own presence in front of the camera, David almost certainly would have been a more robust foil to Culkin’s Benji and the film a more successful endeavor overall.