A Real Pain

A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature as a writer-director, is a sweet-and-sour little road movie about the snarl of complicated feelings that fall under the umbrella of “family.” This encompasses not only the flesh-and-blood relations who exasperate us despite (or because of) our love for them, but also the larger, looming shadow of ancestral legacy. For the follow-up to his underrated and incisive satire When You Finish Saving the World (2022), the actor-turned-director reaches for a reliable template employed by many a Sundance dramedy. Namely, a pair of odd-couple characters embark on a cathartic journey that amplifies their differences – creating mini-crises along the way – but ultimately draws them closer together. However, A Real Pain is sharper and more grounded than most features that follow this outline, eschewing affected Sundance quirkiness for psychological realism. It doesn’t hurt that the leads are played by Kieran Culkin and Eisenberg himself, a fire-and-ice pairing that creates an irresistible crackle of on-screen energy.

Born just a few weeks apart, cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) used to be as close as brothers, but time and circumstance have gradually pulled them apart. David lives in New York City with his wife and young son, where he works a respectable but bland white-collar job as a cog in the digital economy. Benji, meanwhile, is single and unemployed, and is currently sleeping on his mother’s couch upstate. Although they live just three hours apart, David hasn’t seen his cousin in more than six months. When their beloved Holocaust-survivor grandmother dies, however, the pair spend their small inheritance to book a week-long vacation to Poland, where they hope to reconnect with both their Old World Jewish roots and each other. Or at least that’s the plan that David seems to have in mind, compelled as he is by a sticky mélange of affection, unease, and guilt when it comes to the charismatic but erratic Benji.

Eisenberg’s screenplay fills in this backstory slowly over the first day or two of the cousins’ trip. When David and Benji first meet up at JFK Airport, however, the viewer has an immediate sense of their volatile, Order Muppet/Chaos Muppet dynamic. David is the straitlaced member of this dyad: anxious, fussy, introverted, perpetually over-preparing and over-thinking. Benji, meanwhile, is gregarious and garrulous, the kind of natural people-person who is sincerely fascinated by everyone he meets. He’s also something of an abrasive, negligent asshole, prone to mood swings and impulse-control issues. The contrast between these two men couldn’t be starker, but it’s the small details of writing and performance that sell the cousins as real (if infuriating) characters. There’s so much to unpack just in way that Benji smoothly and subtly takes ownership of David’s baggie of homemade trail mix, and in the latter man’s negligible resistance to this micro-aggression. Eisenberg is a master at the perturbed, split-second reaction shot, and he makes smart use of his own actorly talents here.

He and Culkin make for such a watchable pairing that their characters would probably still hold viewers rapt in a single-location two-hander like My Dinner with Andre (1981). A Real Pain is fundamentally a road movie, however, relying on the peculiar psychological space created by travel in an unfamiliar land to shake up the awkward state of the cousins’ relationship. Notwithstanding whatever ancestral connection they might feel with the sights and sounds of the Old County, David and Benji are still tourists who don’t speak the local language. Fortunately, the pair have a gaggle of fellow travelers to bounce off: British guide James (Will Sharpe), recent divorcée Marcia (Jennifer Grey), older married couple Diane and Mark (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan-Canadian convert to the Jewish faith. Eisenberg resists the urge to populate his supporting cast with wacky indie-comedy stereotypes. David and Benji’s tour mates are all earnest, sympathetic people, and they discuss matters of family, faith, and history with the seriousness one would expect of travelers who willingly signed on for a tour that includes a former concentration camp. (Jewish survivor’s guilt comes up more than once.)

The title of Eisenberg’s feature most obviously refers to Benji, who quickly wins over the other members of the tour with his manic affability, before inevitably spoiling the mood with his childish resentments and misbehavior. One senses that this is a pattern with Benji: charm everyone’s pants off, then push them away. There’s another meaning to A Real Pain, however, one that points to the deep, seemingly insoluble aches that afflict the two main characters: the not-so-secret well of destructive despair that haunts Benji, the self-pitying bitterness that David feels in his cousin’s shadow, and the sickening class-tinged guilt that David also bears about the distance that has grown between them. Admittedly, none of this psychological portraiture is presented with much subtlety. Despite David’s general air of clenched aloofness, Eisenberg uses the character’s handful of emotional monologues to tearfully declaim what might better have been left as subtext. Then again, the biggest breakthroughs often occur when people say the most obvious things out loud.

Fans of Liev Schreiber’s underappreciated 2005 directorial debut, Everything Is Illuminated, may note that its story bears at least a passing resemblance to that of A Real Pain. However, Eisenberg’s feature lacks the literary foundation, fanciful touches, and often cartoonish comedy of that film. Its comedic pedigree can instead be discerned in the works of Albert Brooks, Woody Allen, or John Hughes at his most subdued. (Or perhaps a pre-Spotlight Todd McCarthy.) It’s the kind of unfussy, 90-minute character-driven feature that’s easy to miss in a cinematic landscape where flashier auteurist features seem to dominate in the low-to-mid-budget space. However, with two standout features now to his name, Eisenberg has established himself as one of the few young American writer-directors capable of delivering this kind of keen-eyed, unassuming, psychologically engaging work.