Family Ties

Film: A Real Pain
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

I’ve decided to be a little more proactive on watching Oscar films (and 2024 films in general) this year, so I figured diving head-first into A Real Pain would be a good place to start. I tend to like Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg. A running joke I have is that the easiest way to tell the difference between Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera is to remember that Eisenberg is the one with talent. A Real Pain is evidence of this, even if you haven’t liked his previous work; in addition to starring in it, he also wrote and directed it.

The film tells the story of David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), a pair of cousins born less than a month apart. David is a fairly normal, responsible person with a wife and child, and a job selling advertising banners online. He is very concerned with appearance, and with being on time for things, correct and not causing a scene. Benji is the complete opposite, someone with strong ideas and opinions, but who is otherwise aimless. They are wildly different, and have decided to take a trip together to Poland to visit their heritage, the house where their grandmother grew up, and the concentration camp that she survived.

The two are on a tour with others who are either descendants of camp survivors or are Jewish and interested in the history. These people include divorcee Marcia (Jennifer Gray), retired couple Diane and Mark (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), and Rwandan genocide survivor and Jewish convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan). The tour is led by James (Will Sharpe), a British national who has interest in the history, but is otherwise not connected to the history of the place and the people.

This is the backdrop of the film, what we’re going to see as David and Benji learn to renegotiate their relationship. Benji is frustrated with David, who has become serious and has lost touch with him while David wonders when Benji will ever do anything more than live in a basement and smoke marijuana.

On the surface, the “real pain” of the title may be thought of as dealing with this generational trauma of the Holocaust, but it’s not—it's Benji, and also potentially the life that Benji has. Benji has no filter, speaking his mind about anything he wants, usually with language as profanity-laden as he can manage. He’s happy to toss in comments as everyone in the tour group introduces themselves. He openly tells James to stop talking and show respect for the graves at a Polish cemetery rather than just listing off facts. He is simultaneously charming and funny and also annoying and abrasive, and we watch all of this through David’s eyes.

It’s a fascinating thing to watch, because so much of the film is focused on David’s inability to understand who Benji is and what drives and motivates him. He is just as fascinated by his cousin as everyone else and equally frustrated by his actions, his inability to care about anything going on around him, and his apparent lack of understanding that other people exist. It’s crystalized in a moment early on when David offers him a snack made by his wife and Benji simple commandeers it, eventually handing it back to David, telling him to have as much as he wants. When they reach their first hotel, David is desperate for a shower before they meet the group, but Benji insists on going first and takes so long that David doesn’t get his shower.

Kieran Culkin was Oscar-nominated for this role, and deservedly so. I have a lot of work to do still on seeing Best Actor nominations from 2024, but I find it hard to believe that there are five performances that are better than Eisenberg’s. He seems like a clear miss in the category. All of this comes at a moment in the film where, sitting with the rest of the tour group, Benji wanders off and David tells them his life story. It’s as good as Jesse Eisenberg has been in anything he’s ever done, a true “Oscar” moment and a magnificent piece of writing.

This is a near-perfect mix of drama and comedy. There are plenty of truly funny moments throughout that are balanced by the seriousness of where they are, moments in a concentration camp, and the very real drama that has happened in David’s and Benji’s life. At every moment in this, it feels like something really happening. There’s nothing hyperbolic, nothing that smacks of “movie.” It feels honest and genuine.

It’s an interesting choice to have a soundtrack that pulls heavily from the work of Polish composer Frédéric Chopin. It’s something that blends seamlessly with the film, but when you become aware that the piano melodies are from a Polish composer, it feels right, perhaps less so if one realizes that Chopin was wildly anti-Semitic.

Eisenberg should write more if this is what he’s capable of writing.

Why to watch A Real Pain: It feels very real.
Why not to watch: There’s a lot of language, and not all of it feels necessary.