A Real Pain (2024)
Two American cousins in Poland probe a fraught Jewish heritage — and each other
Kieran Culkin as Benji and Jesse Eisenberg as David stop mid-journey to ask where they are
A Real Pain (2024)
In theaters
This movie is a journey, a voyage out, a delving into the past to make sense of the present. It recounts, with quiet, unforced wonder, the search of two men for meaning within their shared ancestral heritage.
The story teases. Their Old-World Jewish roots beckon and they don’t understand why. They go looking to find out what they’re looking for.
Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) plays David Kaplan, a New York City internet advertising guru happily living with his wife and young child. He’s a stolid, slightly uptight middle-class overachiever.
Kieran Culkin (Succession) is David’s cousin Benji Kaplan, whose life in upstate Binghamton, New York, living with his worried mother, has fallen into the doldrums. A free-spirited slacker, he’s also a giddy stoner and smoking weed can set him off unpredictably: rage, tears or laughter pour from him on a dime.
They were close growing up together (their dads were brothers) but in recent years have drifted apart. With the passing of their beloved grandmother, they set out to honor her Jewish legacy in a sojourn to her childhood home in the Polish town she left decades ago to come to America.
Maybe the trip could also mend some cracks in their connection.
Eisenberg’s script is daring in the way it makes personal reconciliation hang on confronting the horrors inflicted on Polish Jews during and after WWII. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust, and the persecution of her forebears prompted her move to America.
Her flight made David and Benji’s lives possible, and they want to pay tribute.
Or is that all that’s going on? It seems the pair’s flinty distance requires a buffer before visiting their grandmother’s childhood home. They join four others, all Jewish, on a Holocaust tour conducted by sensitive Brit James (Will Sharpe), an Oxford-educated Gentile steeped in Jewish history and culture.
Each traveler brings along a story to explain their sojourn. Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy) are a married couple who were moved by their families’ travails in America and want to see the Poland they left.
Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) is a convert who escaped genocide in his home country of Rwanda and finds solace in Judaica. Ten years into his conversion, he’s yearning to pay homage where Jewish faith underwent its most catastrophic ordeal.
Marcia (Jennifer Grey) is a well-off divorcée trying to bring enriched religious understanding to her newly emancipated life.
The group’s stopovers in Poland amount to a kind of soul-stretching road movie. With startling bumps.
At a Warsaw war memorial, Benji urges everyone to pose for photos comically standing before and mimicking gigantic statuary of soldiers in combat. All join in except the reserved David, who finds grinning antics before dead heroes distasteful.
On board a train Benji suddenly becomes enraged that the group is riding in first class. How can they, he fumes, pretend to identify with suffering when they’re ensconced in a deluxe bubble? He storms off into a third-class car, causing David to apologize to the group and chase after Benji to calm him down.
Yet at a graveyard filled with Jewish dead, Benji shakes up James by admonishing him to give life to these lost souls, commemorate their struggles, not just recite them as grim history. A chastened James and the group take his plea to heart.
As they visit sites of some of Poland’s former Jewish strongholds, a butcher shop, a tailor, the sites of a vanished library or bookstore, survivor’s guilt seeps into the narrative. Eisenberg is masterly in letting this traumatic turn slowly dawn on the tourists and us.
The harrowing concentration camp Majdanek, five minutes from the city center of Lublin, is the site of torture and extermination. The group’s hushed, tearful reactions are as shattering as any raging fury could be.
Out of Benji’s hearing, David spills to the group his resentment at Benji’s willfulness – confounded by his undeniable charm – and we see the held-in “respectable” cousin reduced to tears.
The cousins separate from the group, with warm farewells, to visit the childhood home of their grandmother, and we wonder if the ties that bind them could have grown stronger in one supercharged week.
The cousins’ most vexing unsolved mystery may be the person they’re sitting next to
Eisenberg’s writing doesn’t turn soft. From the beginning the cagey script’s actual focus has been on the present, not the past. Neither man can bring back the lives of Holocaust victims. The only lives they can rescue, or at least repair, are their own.
In his second feature as writer-director, Eisenberg smoothly swerves between conflicting emotions, from clowning to sorrow, and suits the actions’ gravity to the ordinary people he’s portraying. There are no show-stopping roles.
The performances mesh to make the jagged experience whole and involving, like watching people you know confront what they’re not sure they can bear.
Eisenberg the actor has grown even more subtle and split-second accurate in his reactions. Emotions fluctuate across David’s face with the tremor of a mind about to lose it or a man gritting his teeth to cope; he’s never entirely sure which part of him will win out.
The revelation here is Culkin’s Benji. It’s a firecracker performance from an actor who can shake you as you watch Benji yearn for self-control, groping for a sliver of peace to hold onto.
Culkin’s raw, minutely fleshed out work here is nothing like his big swinging blowhard Roman Roy in Succession. Scared, snappish Roman’s desperate reach was outward to his family, especially to his father, for solace.
Benji is turned completely inward, adrift, hurting, yet somehow wittily valiant, struggling to keep himself together. He’s in the grip of a pain so deep he can’t express it to anyone, not even to David at his most caring.
Culkin is so immersed that his Benji dares us to turn away. Transfixed, we may want to reach out and hold Benji still, if only to momentarily comfort and calm him. But he gets the last uneasy, unblinking look into our faces, and fully earns the movie’s final, choking, sign-off.