Jesse Eisenberg marks his sophomore feature as writer/director with A Real Pain, which he also stars in (as David Kaplan) alongside Kieran Culkin (as Benji Kaplan). The pair play cousins who grew up so close they were practically brothers in their boyhood, but they have drifted apart in adulthood and now can’t even be bothered to take the train to visit each other. However, the film quickly introduces they’ll spend a week together on a trip to Poland, ending where their grandmother, who has recently died, used to live. She also had an incredibly close relationship with Benji, to the point she’s referred to as his best friend.
The film does a great job of immediately distilling our perception of these characters as opposites.
David: high-strung, calling Benji constantly with every status update.
Benji: chilling at the airport for hours people-watching, ignoring David’s calls, with warm yogurt in his pants.
These first impressions do a lot to show us how the pair have drifted, but Eisenberg does a masterful job of showing how they both desire the things the other has. Be it Benji replaying David’s video of his son, or David trying to find out what Benji learned about Marcia (played by Jennifer Grey) in their tour group after he went to talk with her because she had a sadness about her, but he could not join Benji himself to talk with Marcia.
Benji is in pain, and he can be a pain. He is not an easy character, but the film doesn’t ask him to be, it allows him to feel his pain and express it, and that pairs well with a Jewish tour of Poland that can’t escape the events of the Holocaust. While Benji and David have direct ties to the Holocaust in Poland through their grandmother, who survived it, the others in the group have different connections, from Mark and Diane (played by Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy), whose family got out before the Holocaust to Eloge, who survived the Rwandan genocide and converted to Judaism because he found connection in the community in his new home in Canada. James (played by Will Sharpe), their affable tour guide, takes the brunt of Benji’s pain that is released in spurts of anger, and he has been made an easy target for it in the film as the lone non-Jewish representative guiding them on this tour through generational trauma. It works as a narrative device, but multiple times, this tour was touted as luxury, with them getting first-class train tickets being one of the things that set Benji off. I know people who take high-end tours. I know the people they hire as tour guides, and while James’ background and degrees rang true enough, I was surprised that a company that seemingly specialized in this tour did not have a Jewish guide.
The two characters are both explorations of loneliness and pain. While Benji wears his pain more openly, he can also connect with others, something that David struggles to do and really wishes he could do with Benji, who he loves but seems to struggle to connect with now despite their former closeness. It’s a bridge of a divide that walks hand in hand with their journey through Poland, the country that they are descendants from, and if things had been very different, it is the country they muse they would have been from (though logic dictates that their existence is predicated on the specific confluence of events that included their grandmother leaving Poland). While Culkin’s portrayal of pain is more readily accessible to the audience in Benji because it is louder, David’s pain, which bubbles below the surface, is just as present. As both actor and director, Eisenberg does a great job of balancing the performance and these two characters, giving them equal weight in a two-hander film with no real lead.
A Real Pain is currently in theatres.
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