Writer/Director/Star Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Navigate Rocky Road of Comedy/Drama
Who’s in more pain: The guy who holds nothing back, or the guy who keeps everything inside?
If it seems odd for a comedy to have such a heavy question at its center, that’s all part of the magic trick that Jesse Eisenberg has pulled off as writer/director/star of A Real Pain. While it may seem counterintuitive to make a road comedy about a couple American cousins going on a Holocaust tour in Poland, Eisenberg’s film is attuned to the ways that laughter can percolate on the other side of discomfort and/or outright tragedy.
But A Real Pain is also very much aware of the ways in which the brightest smiles and broadest laughs can serve as masks for deep wells of feeling, a disparity it engages and provokes in dozens of different forms across its compact 90 minute runtime. The result is a small gem of a movie, consistent in its humor and boundlessly surprising in its humanity.
A Real Pain centers on two American cousins: David (Eisenberg) and Benjy (Kieran Culkin). Essentially raised as brothers, they’ve grown into two very different men: David is a happily married father, yet he walks through the world in a near-permanent flinch.
Benjy, meanwhile, is everything that David wants to be: Effortlessly charming and personable, able to make profound connections with other people in a matter of seconds. But that extroversion comes with its own downsides. Words spew out of Benjy’s mouth at a mile a minute pace, totally unfiltered and unencumbered by anything like social decorum. If David has closed himself off from feeling too much, Benjy feels everything too deeply and projects that feeling back out far too loudly.
Together, the duo travel around Poland with a tour group, exploring the culture and legacy of the recently departed grandmother whose death haunts both men. Benjy especially has been left unmoored and aimless after the loss of someone so clearly central to his life, and David clearly hopes that this trip will galvanize his cousin back into a more proactive manner of living.
The tour is led by trivia-minded guide James (Will Sharpe) and includes the compassionate Marcia, (Jennifer Grey, and yes that’s the dirty dancing, Ferris Bueller bullying Jennifer Grey) Rwandan genocide survivor Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan) and Midwestern couple Diane (Daniel Oreskes) and Mark (Liza Sadovy).
There’s plenty of heavy subject matter to be dealt with, in both the contemporary struggles of these men and the historical atrocities that frame their family’s history. There is indeed quote a lot of, ahem, real pain at the soul of A Real Pain. But it needs be said that Eisenberg did not construct this film to wallow in griefs both historical and all-too present. Instead, he’s built the film as a lowkey hangout pleasure. The frame overflows with color, lavishing the Polish cityscapes and countryside with a romantic glow even as cinematographer Michal Dymek (a Warsaw native) zeroes in on the specificities of local life that don’t usually catch the Hollywood eye.
And it’s funny! Really, earnestly, consistently funny. It helps that Eisenberg and Culkin are the driving force of every scene. They share an effortless chemistry that really does convey a meaningful lifetime bond. Both men have honed their craft to its top form over the course of their careers and bring everything they have to their respective characters. Eisenberg is better at playing discomfort than almost anyone, able to use the barest of twitches or eyebrow lifts to convey volumes of panic.
As for Culkin, it will come as a shock to no one who has seen his work in anything from Scott Pilgrim to Succession that the man can volley foulmouthed punchlines with the best of them. But he’s also tapped into a vein of of raw nerve mania that comes as a surprise even to those already familiar with Roman Roy.
Eisenberg’s script has the generosity to give killer moments to the whole ensemble, letting each character have their own distinct point of view and comedic game. It’s especially lovely to see Grey in such a prominent role again, playing equal parts salty and compassionate.
As a director, Eisenberg favors keeping as many actors in frame as he can, giving his ensemble the space to dictate the pacing and rhythms of a scene. But he’s also not settling for a point-and-shoot/figure it out in the edit looseness. In maybe the film’s centerpiece sequence, Eisenberg delivers a powerhouse monologue while sitting at the head of a table. As he finally vents the repressed emotion that’s been curdling in his heart since before the film even began, the camera gradually moves in tighter, trapping you in this space with David as he can’t help from oversharing. When Eisenberg does finally cut, he uses the cutaways to not only capture the reaction to this speech from the ensemble, but to utilize the broken time and empty space of the frame to steadily build the tension of when Benjy is going to drop in and overhear his cousin’s purge.
All that being said, Eisenberg’s most effective weapon is maybe just the performance that Culkin gives here. As Benjy, he is so unbelievably charming and funny and sensitive…until the wrong mood strikes him and he becomes unconscionably rude and nasty. Culkin makes a meal out of fitting those contradictions together inside the skin of this man, fully embodying everything charming and alluring about Benjy while also owning everything monstrous and infuriating about him.
While A Real Pain grapples with heavy subject matter, Eisenberg is careful to never let grandiosity overwhelm his story. This trip is probably not the most important week in the lives of these men. There are no grand epiphanies or revelations. Lives are not changed, except perhaps in imperceptible shifts that will only manifest long after the movie ends. Hell, maybe Eisenberg can get the gang back together in a decade for a Before Sunset-style check-in to see what, if anything, these two have actually learned from this shared experience.
By keeping the scope narrow and the histrionics in check, A Real Pain never feels like it is grasping for cheap, Oscar-bait pomposity or importance. Instead the emotions it conjures up, be they painful or not, are understated and deeply earned.
You might even say: Real.
A Real Pain is currently in theaters.
