NATHAN WEINBENDER:
David and Benji are both tightly wound, but in very different ways. They’re cousins who grew up together but have drifted apart: David is married with a young kid, Benji still lives with his parents. They reconnect for a heritage tour of Poland, where their recently deceased grandmother survived a concentration camp in the 1940s. Benji is taking her death particularly hard. He’s a human tornado of grief and torment.
Such is the setup for A Real Pain, an incisive and bruising comedy that’s both, somehow, a very funny portrait of opposing personalities and a meditative travelogue of despair.
Within minutes of meeting David and Benji, I felt like I already knew them deeply. Surely the casting works as shorthand. David is played by Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed the film, in his default mode of full-body wince. Benji is played by Kieran Culkin, with his trademark bull-in-a-china-shop cockiness and his use of four-letter words as punctuation.
Benji is one of those guys who seems to make friends everywhere he goes. His confidence is endearing one moment and totally misplaced the next. David, by contrast, is closed off and risk averse, and all of his insecurities are amplified when it’s in such sharp contrast to his cousin’s brashness.
The trip doesn’t begin smoothly. Benji throws a fit about the hypocrisy of sitting on a train in first class when their ancestors had no such luxury. He castigates the tour guide for emphasizing facts and figures over real human stories. He occasionally breaks down into heaving sobs. David is sometimes so mortified by his cousin’s behavior that he simply turns and looks in the opposite direction, as if staring will only make things worse.
Eisenberg’s script provides the characters (and us) with emotional epiphanies not at the end of the film, but about halfway through. The tour group is having dinner at a cozy inn, shortly after visiting an extermination camp. Benji is getting drunk and disruptive. He goes to the bathroom, and David uses the opportunity to unload dark secrets about Benji, and it not only gives us a window into Benji’s mental state but further underlines David’s weaknesses: He pities his cousin, but he also wants to wound him and give himself an upper hand with these relative strangers.
The last half hour of A Real Pain isn’t really about David and Benji changing: It’s about them confronting the things that have kept them from changing as much as they should have. If it at first seems like Eisenberg and Culkin are merely leaning into their respective acting quirks, their performances grow deeper and more unexpected, especially Culkin, who plays Benji’s outbursts not as childish tantrums but as unfettered displays of vulnerability. The filmmaking here has an ease about it, even though the characters don’t, and Eisenberg’s dialogue is barbed, bitter, breakneck and often hilarious.
As for that title—A Real Pain—it means something different to us leaving the theater as it did when we walked in. Eisenberg superimposes the title on-screen at the beginning and again at the end, both times over the same basic close-up shot. And though the film ends in the same place it began, the context is different. All I could do was nod to myself, because it’s just right. This is certainly one of the best movies of the year.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM on KPBX and Saturday afternoons at 1:30 PM on KSFC.
