A Real Pain boasts a wrecking ball of a performance from Kieran Culkin
A Real Pain starts and ends at the same spot. Two cousins, David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), as close as brothers, attempt to heal their generational trauma and their relationship with each other by flying out to Poland to visit their late grandmother’s house. But most trips abroad, no matter the weight of transformation we place on them, start and end at the same spot. Usually, it’s an airport terminal hall.
The real test of how much we’ve been transformed only occurs once we’ve reentered the quotidian cycle of our lives. Yet Eisenberg, also the film’s writer and director, makes a provocative choice here. We never find out what happens next. A Real Pain is a film that’s really an ellipsis. That’s where it derives its tender power.
David and Benji join a group on a Jewish heritage tour: recent divorcée Marcia (Jennifer Grey), married couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy), Rwandan genocide survivor and Jewish convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), and British guide James (Will Sharpe, in a performance full of perfectly stammered platitudes), who is not himself Jewish but considers himself a scholar in the Jewish experience.
Their journey is strictly scheduled and emotionally predetermined. A visit to the Warsaw Uprising Monument leads to a walk through Lublin’s pre-war traces of Jewish life, and, finally, to the aching silence of Majdanek concentration camp. It’s a tour primed for revelation. But a revelation of what? Eisenberg fills that anxious blank space with genuine questions seeking genuine answers, delivered by the comforting typewriter patter of his own voice, and a poignant, wrecking ball performance by Culkin.
Eisenberg’s work as actor, director, and writer has become a shorthand for millennial neurosis (he previously directed 2022’s coming-of-age drama When You Finish Saving the World). David and Benji sit at opposite ends of that spectrum. The former is a diligent micro-manager of his pain. The latter is charismatic, but volatile; so much of an active listener that he’ll cry out, “Oh snap!”, when Eloge shares that he’s a survivor of genocide.
“Isn’t everyone in pain in some way?” David argues. We’re in the middle of a group meal, and Benji has just stormed off, disorientated by a manic outburst that his new acquaintances are learning is a periodic experience. David is frustrated, sympathetic to his cousin, but oddly jealous about the fact he’s too in control of his emotional faculties to express how he feels. “I know that my pain is unexceptional so I don’t feel the need to burden everyone with it.”
That particular moment is exquisitely managed by Eisenberg, in all his roles here. But A Real Pain is, and has been designed to be, Culkin’s film, and the exposed nerve quality of his performance has already seen him richly rewarded, most recently with a Golden Globe. Benji works so well as a character because the actor offers equal attention to his skittish, surface qualities and the deeper turmoil that drives them. He’s funny and unpredictable at first, even a little antisocial, but it hurts when all the pieces finally click tragically into place.
Both men miss their grandmother terribly. She passed six months earlier, and they have nowhere, it seems, to place all that grief. That’s why they’re here. Both are products of generational trauma but, as David phrases it, something beautiful, too – “a thousand f***ing miracles”. How do they open themselves up to that history, to the suffering of their ancestors, while simultaneously squaring up their own privileges with the vast emptiness they feel inside? There’s no real answer to that question. So, A Real Pain stays honest. We end up back at the start.
Dir: Jesse Eisenberg. Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes. Cert 15, 90 mins.
‘A Real Pain’ is in cinemas from 8 January
