A Real Pain
Family ties and historic trauma make for a hell of a vacation
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin learn the joys of grief and group travel in A Real Pain.
Cousins Benji and David (Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg) choose to honor the death of their grandmother by taking a trip through Poland. Their grandmother escaped the Holocaust with her life, and they want to see her homeland and learn more about her experiences to feel closer to the woman who shaped them both.
It’s a lovely idea, but there’s one teeny flaw: Benji and David are polar opposites. David is very concerned with appearances and politeness. He’s not going to speak up at an inconvenience, he certainly won’t be making a scene. Benji is, for lack of a better term, a real pain. Charming one moment, manically ranting the next, he’s a live wire. That’s interesting, unless you have to deal with him 24/7.
As their trip through Poland progresses, the cousins unearth their grandmother’s past and confront traumas that have caused a rift in their family. Can they find a way back to each other?
Eisenberg is pulling triple duty on this film: writing, directing, and acting. It’s an impressive feat and works…most of the time. The film feels like a loose collection of ideas more than a cohesive story. And often, Eisenberg seems to lose confidence in his audience, hammering his points home with obvious dialogue and scenes. It gets a bit frustrating to be asked “did you get it?” cinematically every 20 minutes in a film.
While Eisenberg’s movie seems most interested in dealing with grief and how silence can tear relationships apart, it’s mostly a road movie. At the core of a road movie is caring about the characters we encounter. Unfortunately for A Real Pain, Eisenberg’s David is a bit of a drip, Culkin’s Benji is exhausting, and everyone else we encounter seems to only be in the scene so we can move Benji and David from point A to point B.
The real issue with A Real Pain is that I’m not sure it’s offering anything we haven’t seen before. There are lots of films about grief and broken families, and this one isn’t really anything I’ll remember distinctly. Eisenberg’s performance is the same tick-y, twitchy performance he’s given since he started acting. Culkin, for all the awards talk he’s garnered, is offering nothing new from his aggressively anxious performance in Succession. The fact that everyone reacts to Benji’s boorish nonsense as if it’s charming remains the only interesting point in the movie. The whole film felt like being trapped in a room at the worst dinner party you can imagine.
Using the over-arching theme of the type of people who seek out Holocaust tourism (which, admittedly, is a morbid way to see Europe) is an interesting one, but we never really get to know the other members of the tour group. Eisenberg has the kernels of something really interesting, but squanders it by simply focusing on the two most obnoxious people in the room.
I’m also not sure treating mental illness as a condition that makes you impossibly charming to everyone around you, except your cousin, is a fair thing to do. It feels like an idealized version of a person struggling with a disease, a literal manic pixie dream cousin, if you will. Benji is bright and funny and egotistical and rude and aggressive…but it’s fine, guys, because everyone else is cool with it! As someone who’s been party to several obnoxious American tour groups in Europe, I don’t buy for a second that Benji and David wouldn’t have been thrown out of the group after the third outburst.
Even the poignant moments felt forced. When the boys have a quiet moment honoring their grandmother, it just rings hollow, like a story contrivance. I don’t doubt Eisenberg’s sincerity or his ideas, but the result is something I still find rather tedious.
This is a film with excellent motives but a lackluster execution. If you’re a fan of Eisenberg or couldn’t miss an episode of Succession, this movie will no doubt be a delight, but for this reviewer, I was just hoping Brian Cox would storm into the room and tell everyone involved, “You’re not serious people”.
Verdict: I’d skip this trip.
A Real Pain is rated R and available in theaters
