USA, — The last time we saw Kieran Culkin, he was drinking to the end of a family dynasty on HBO’s “Succession,” a smile slowly curdling as his face fills the frame and the camera cuts away from Roman Roy for the last time. Whether you saw relief or despair behind his eyes reflects how you saw Roman himself – at once the most explosive Roy sibling and also the most sympathetic one – as the reality about his place in the world finally dawned on him. The fact you could genuinely see either, meanwhile, speaks to Culkin’s infinitely layered performance, and his uncanny ability of looking straight through the same façade Roman for so long thinks he’s shielded by.
Those same mysterious eyes welcome us to the world of “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature and a dramedy that explores what happens when different coping mechanisms grind against one other. The moving, funny, light-on-its feet film has a similar penchant as “Succession” for bouncing between the operatic and the barbed, and so too does Culkin’s Benji Kaplan feel just as damaged as Roman, even as the hoodie-wearing Jewish stoner doesn’t wield the societal power and privilege that empowers him to shrug off a cataclysmic rocket launch. Benji is infinitely more sensitive than Roman, too; he doesn’t think twice about bouncing up to a fellow Heritage Tour companion walking alone through a Poland park, leaving his introverted cousin David (Eisbenberg) dumbfounded at his limitless enthusiasm. That confusion is sparked not in the least because he’s having trouble squaring Benji the easygoing cheer machine with the Benji who’s quietly distraught at their grandmother’s recent passing—the reason they decided to visit the Polish home where she lived before being shepherded to a concentration camp during the Holocaust.
David does notice the façade erected by Benji’s eyes, and we do too as the camera carefully seeks him out at an airport in the movie’s opening moments, mulling over something that’s happened, something that will, perhaps both. What David finds himself gauging over the runtime of “A Real Pain” – a character study of contrasting cousins as much as an allegory about how time cauterizes our deepest wounds – is whether to pick through it with a chisel or a sledgehammer, and whether or not Benji is about to do the same from the other side.
Like Eisenberg’s last movie, the tantalizing new-gen scorcher “When You Finish Saving the World” – which the budding filmmaker also wrote – “A Real Pain” delves into the urgency of existential argument. But if that debut was about trying to figure out what precisely in the world is worth spending time figuring out, the “Social Network” star’s follow-up is about grinding towards a consensus of how to talk about them at all.
To wit, the intimate, vulnerable and occasionally fiery conversations of “A Real Pain” start as any conversation does: with introductions. David and Benji are reacquainted at the airport, their initial awkwardness clearly a step or two beyond “Hey cuz, it’s been a minute!”-ism but organic enough to invest us immediately in where they stand. Benji is extroverted to the point of recklessness, looking for a job and not returning his cousin's calls; David is muted and fastidious, with a family he loves and a steady tech job. They’re yin and yang, and will come to challenge how the other is approaching this monumental journey that Benji occasionally accosts for its touristy pleasantries, even though he’s the one raring to trigger a hotel alarm to smoke a joint on the roof. The participants of the small Heritage Tour crew – which includes Rwandan refugee Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan); Marcia, Jennifer Grey’s recently divorced New Yorker; and James (Will Sharpe), their scholarly guide – are written with just enough dimension that we can anticipate who will respond with sensitivity and who with disdain when Benji questions why an exploration of grim history is being approached so casually.
Even before Benji lashes out for the first time about the Heritage Tour takers keeping their emotional guardrails up in a place where one of modern history’s worst atrocities unfolded – a bracing scene tipping us off that “A Real Pain” might be more memorable for its emotionally charged set pieces than what they build up to – he seems defensive to the point of self-defeat, the irony (or hypocrisy) that he might be the most guarded of all of them starting to come into view.
But rarely do David and Benji’s new friends represent more than a barometer for the cousins’ central, volatile relationship, which only grows in its complexity the closer they get to grandma’s home. “A Real Pain” – a title whose layers reveal themselves in time – is a movie about how we respond to one another, and subsequently how (or whether) we interrogate our positions of emotional understanding. With each Benji outburst, we learn more about David too; rather than position his ordinariness as superior to Benji’s willingness to speak his mind no matter how smoldering the fallout, “A Real Pain” navigates a tougher but more enlightening path towards places of communal understanding. The intelligence of Eisenberg’s script is matched by his willingness to weave in some hilarious bits to offset the seriousness of it all; both he and Culkin are just as effective when they’re avoiding the train ticket-taker as when they’re reckoning with whether their bond can ever return to what it was in simpler times.
To his credit, Eisenberg makes an effort to reflect the discordance Benji is struggling to acclimate to in Poland through his direction. Beautiful wide shots of European architecture are offset by traditional comedic blocking accentuating the performances’ funnier turns. Gentle filmmaking rhythms are punctuated by appropriately timed cutaways to the travelers trying in vain to recognize picturesque Poland for the history that unfolded there decades ago. And the effect of the orchestral score is only fully amplified when it cuts out entirely on the Heritage Tour’s visit to a concentration camp, a brief sequence as stunningly heart-rending as you’d expect.
These aesthetic dichotomies don’t always work elegantly, but they’re also merely a stage for the journey David and Benji are on to find their way back to mutual recognition, or at least sympathy. And Culkin and Eisenberg play their roles magnificently, signaling how our individual humanity – how we grieve, how we communicate, how we stumble and how we charge forward – is defined as much by the walls we erect around us as by the force of will by which we finally decide to knock them down.
"A Real Pain" is rated R for language throughout and some drug use. Now in San Antonio theaters. Runtime: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
Starring Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Gray
Directed and written by Jesse Eisenberg
2024
