A Real Pain captures pain’s reality

Reel Impressions is The NewsHouse’s weekly film review. Contributors Francesco Desiderio and Travis Newbery cover everything from new releases to trending classics.

One might think that the titular real pain within Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie would have to do with the Holocaust tour the plot takes place during, and that can certainly be the case with a surface level viewing. But at its core, A Real Pain explores how our personal and collective pains manifest themselves and affect us as people. 

The film revolves around fractious cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) Kaplan as members of the tour mentioned above, taking place across Poland. They have elected to take this tour following the death of their grandmother Dory, who survived a concentration camp and was from a Polish town near the path of the tour.

David and Benji could not be more different. David is quiet, keeps to himself, openly grapples with OCD – and almost definitely social anxiety, as well – and is very homesick for his wife and toddler back home. Benji is authentic and effortlessly charming, but perhaps at the cost of being fairly sensitive and “too” emotional, if there is such a thing. 

As the tour progresses, Benji becomes increasingly outspoken and agitated. While initially positive and endearing when he went against the social grain in different respects, like getting the entire group sans David to pose alongside a statue commemorating fighters of the brutal, failed Warsaw Uprising, his outbursts later grow to be quite uncomfortable and vexing. One of these outbursts is a rather confrontational exchange with the tour’s guide, where Benji voices his want for a kind of tour that is less names, dates and places and more about genuine interaction with the people and places along the tour that have real connections with the Holocaust. 

It’s obvious Benji is a complex and deeply passionate person that is still reeling from the death of the person he was closest with, and now this tour is invoking new shades of pain stemming from Grandma Dory’s personal history in Poland. But you just know there’s a type of person that can watch this and have no engagement beyond: “Wow yeah, he’s just another one of those loud annoying guys on the group tour.” 

Through Benji’s character, the film presents an interesting question on pain’s place in society. Sure, it might be annoying and uncomfortable, but is it truly that bad for someone like Benji to be so expressive and unflinchingly vulnerable, especially in the wake of a life-altering loss? When did a culture that culminates in “just be yourself” being the most widely-cited dating advice become so averse to emotional transparency at this scale?

Benji is a hero of more than his own pain, though. Instead of being triggered at sites like the aforementioned Warsaw Uprising memorial or the concentration camp, it’s in random moments when he faces the kind of pain one might expect a Jewish person to experience while taking a Holocaust tour. Moments like a first class train ride, when just 80 years ago his ancestors would’ve been imprisoned in the back of that same train.

Through his honest charm, he can’t help but try to solicit similar pain in his fellow tourists, all of whom are also Jewish. In his beration of the guide, he laments that people have become so closed off to even acknowledging the pain of others and ongoing collective sufferings like the Holocaust elsewhere in the world. Is he right? At a time when individualism is everything and the future looks grim in many different places, one’s initial state of mind may not naturally lean toward empathy, but maybe it should.

On the flip side of Benji’s worldview is David’s. In a rare moment of quiet for the group when Benji goes to the bathroom, David, the introvert, really opens up for the first and only time in the movie and monologues about Benji’s background and his relationship with pain. David sees so much potential in Benji, who instead chooses to squander it by never living without his heart on his sleeve. David, however, has always been aware of his and his pain’s small place among everybody else in the world and their own pains, so he has chosen to metaphorically sit down and shut up in life. Not to mention he’s constantly crippled by secondhand embarrassment for Benji, so he can’t begin to imagine acting, nay, existing so boldly and loudly in the first place.

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This entirely “left brain vs. right brain” dynamic of David and Benji speaks so much to Jesse Eisenberg as a writer/director. The everyday battle between being a human and dwelling in your pain versus moving on with yourself in the name of success is certainly something that I for one have been struggling with recently. Everyone wants to be content and stay afloat, but how can we be wrong and worse off for having the most basic urges to let our emotions out, at least sometimes? 

Beyond the writing and direction, praise is due for its main performances. Eisenberg is not unlike how you’d think of any typecasted Jesse Eisenberg performance, but having written and directed himself, he plays it with a level of impact I don’t think I’ve seen from him before. And Culkin, in such a larger-than-life role to begin with, is plain explosive. To make a connection, imagine his multi-award winning performances as Roman Roy in Succession, but if Roman was raised by a couple of human beings and not a family of business tycoons. Despite being campaigned and already winning some awards as a supporting character instead of the co-lead he obviously is, he deserves all the acclaim he’s getting and will continue to get in weeks to come. 

A Real Pain asks us to consider our real pains in the face of our real lives. Should we simply zip it and get on with it already? Maybe. But maybe it’s also important to not have the line too far out of reach; sometimes we all need to just have it, whatever “it” is for each of us, out.