A REAL PAIN - Mark Reviews Movies

A Real Pain, Searchlight Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 31, 2024

The Kaplan cousins are as different as can be. Benji (Kieran Culkin) wears his heart on his sleeve, and David (Jesse Eisenberg) keeps his emotions hidden. Benji doesn't have much going on in his life in terms of employment or family, and David works a steady, well-paying job and has a wife and young son. A Real Pain puts them together at a trying time in their lives, six months after the death of a beloved grandmother, and in a situation that forces them to deal with grief, tragedy, and death on a much larger scale.

This film, written and directed by Eisenberg, is subtle and sly in both how it presents its main characters and revealing the depths of how this relationship has changed over the years, as well as how they really are more alike than either might care to admit. To be sure, Benji and David love each other as a family and, maybe more importantly at this point in their lives, genuinely like each other as people, but one doesn't know a person for a lifetime without seeing and learning maybe too much about that individual for comfort. There often comes a point when relationships, even the closest of them, become an effort, and that's where this one has come—for David, at least.

What we learn about David and Benji, as the two introduce themselves to a tour group they've joined in Poland to retrace the history of the Jewish people in that country, is that they're basically akin to brothers. After all, they grew up together in New York City and spent so much time together as kids, teenagers, and young men. They'd spend long nights out in the city, going on adventures and having fun, until, inevitably, David would get too tired and fall asleep on a bench wherever the exhaustion hit him.

Benji reminds his cousin of that while they sit in a Warsaw hotel room, still buzzing from the joint they smoked on the roof and reminiscing about the good old days. David was always a "lightweight," Benji says, and that strikes some kind of nerve in David, who's already feeling inadequate next to his cousin—a guy who can make fast friends by entering a room and charming just about everyone within it. David knows this, and he also knows too well that Benji has probably gotten away with a lot in his life and hidden a lot about himself—too much—simply by being—or, at least, trying to be—the most interesting person in any room.

There's a lot going on here—too much, as seems to be the running theme of this film, to fully detail. Some of it is simply too complicated and contradictory, as people can be and which Eisenberg's screenplay embraces, to put into simple words. Some of it is compounded by the situation the two men are in, as they face the horrors of the pasts of their family and an entire people in Poland. Some of it shouldn't be mentioned, since it comes as a surprise over the course of this story. It is a surprise, because both of these men are so good at hiding their emotions in completely distinct ways.

Indeed, David is so good at it that Benji doesn't even think anything is wrong with his cousin. Why should it be? He has a career, which Benji insults every chance he gets (if he doesn't create an opportunity to do so), and a family and a boring old life that means David is living life the way everyone thinks a person should. He used to be cool and more open with his feelings, Benji says a few times, and why can't he be like that anymore?

There's a telling moment here, when Benji mentions to David that he suspects Marcia (Jennifer Grey), another member of the tour group, has a sadness behind her eyes. He's good at noticing those things—even David acknowledges that when the subject arises later.

Here's the thing, though: Eisenberg's camera, which so often finds quiet moments of faces experiencing and contemplating everything they're hearing and seeing on this tour and in conversation, captures an obvious sadness behind David's eyes repeatedly and consistently throughout the film. Is Benji not as empathetic as he lets on, or are his bond with and assumptions about David blinding him to what's so clearly right in front of him, if he bothered to consider it for just a moment?

The film, which is funny and insightful and affecting on both an intimate and a larger scale (Scenes devoted to the sights of the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto and a concentration camp are given an isolated air of respect and mournful weight apart from the drama), gets at all of this by observing these characters in a series of moments. Those moments don't seem like much on their own but together cascade into a fine portrait of the men as individuals and their tricky relationship together.

What seem like little annoyances—that Benji is impulsive and attention-seeking and selfish (We learn that quickly, after David announces he wants to take a shower after their long flight and Benji occupies the bathroom until it's too late for his cousin)—become an entire personality that David might be trying to escape. What seem like little resentments—that David has everything anyone could want—become reminders of failures that Benji might want to avoid.

The conflict here, in other words, is much deeper than merely familial matters and differences of character, because both of these men don't really know what to say to each other. To say what they're thinking might reveal too much about themselves, their own fears, their own flaws, and their awful, sneaking suspicions that, whatever this relationship is now, it will never be like it once was. By the end, we don't know, because neither character does, what this relationship even will or could be.

That's all both from the subdued nature of Eisenberg's filmmaking and the specificity of the lead performances. Culkin is the driving force of A Real Pain, to be sure, playing the mercurial cousin with plenty of brash charm and a fragile emotional state, but Eisenberg has the difficult task of letting us see David when no one else, not even his cousin, seems to be paying attention.

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