Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin share the screen as clashing cousins retracing their roots on a trip to Poland, blending laughs with a poignant exploration of identity.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
In “A Real Pain,” writer-director Jesse Eisenberg and co-star Kieran Culkin, who has been on a tear, play mismatched Jewish cousins Benji Kaplan and David Kaplan, who, after years apart, decide to embark upon a possibly dark, possibly bonding journey on a Polish Holocaust tour to retrace the steps of their late, beloved grandmother. Like many Jews of her generation, the young men’s grandmother fled Eastern Europe and the death camps as a young woman during the Nazi scourge to start a new life in the United States. The film may appear to be a standard “dramedy” road movie mixing laughs, heartwarming elements, dire truths, daunting family history, and confrontations. But the truth is that the screenplay by Eisenberg is an almost classic picaresque tale with Eisenberg and Culkin sharing duties as the roguish hero of the form, who lives by his wits and who, despite his frequently disreputable, if not downright dire behavior, gains a place in our affections. The picaro part doesn’t quite fit David anymore. He is married, lives in Brooklyn with his wife and young son, and makes a living selling ads on the internet, an occupation Benji cruelly mocks. Benji, for his part, does not do much, lives in Binghamton, N.Y., with family, and has issues requiring medication. The two meet at the airport, where Benji informs David that he expects a delivery of weed at their destination in Poland, which causes David’s high-pitched voice to jump two octaves, a trick Eisenberg has long since mastered.
Cinematographer Michal Dymek, who also shot Jerzy Skolimowski’s marvelous, award-winning 2022 donkey tale “EO,” brings his amazingly mobile camera to the film, following our battling but loving heroes. Benji and David are like brothers who, at some point, split and went on very different paths. In Warsaw, they meet up with a small group with whom they will travel, an older couple, a somewhat pompous but likable British tour guide named James (Will Sharpe), a divorced, aging beauty named Marsha (Jennifer Grey), and a young Rwandan who converted to Judaism named Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan). This motley crew makes its way to a monument of the Ghetto Uprising, where we see a plaque extolling a “resilient people.” Meanwhile, Benji injects as much chaos as possible because … he can. Sometimes, this just means grabbing David by the neck and vigorously tapping his skull as if the actors are in some “Dumb and Dumber” movie. Anyone who has had an embarrassing brother or other close relative will recognize Benji as the trickster and joker he is. At their hotel, Benji ignores a No Entry sign on a door to find a route to the roof where he and David share a joint.
Are the men just a couple of displaced Poles? What would their lives have been like if their grandmother had not been made to flee for her life by the forces of evil? Benji objects to the creature comforts—the first-class meals and cabins—they enjoy in train cars while they trace past horrors. He points out what hypocrisy, of course, loving that he gets on everyone’s nerves.
That is Benji’s raison d’etre, to make the comfortable uncomfortable. For example, Benji observes that “money is heroin for boring people.” On a trip to Lublin, aka “the Jewish Oxford,” a place where Jews thrived until they did not and were massacred by the forces of Nazi Germany, Benji is no less a disruptive force with Culkin, a recent Emmy winner for “Succession,” reportedly improvising his lines. Nana was partial to Benji, perhaps because she intuited that he would have a harder life. The lilting, often exuberant piano that we hear is Poland’s own Frederic Chopin. Although it’s not kosher in some circles these days, I’d be remiss not to point out that Eisenberg has much in common with Woody Allen, beginning with a shared heritage and roots in New York City Jewish intelligentsia. They also share neurotic personalities and see life through a Freudian filter, although Eisenberg, whose previous effort “When You Finish Saving the World” (2022), was about an unfulfilling mother-son relationship, is less obsessed with the opposite sex and romance than Allen. With all his riffing and jazzing, Culkin is brilliant. But Benji can take the nihilism too far sometimes. Will David help him to survive?
‘A Real Pain’
Rating: R for language throughout and some drug use.
Cast: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan
Director-Writer: Jesse Eisenberg
Running time: 90 minutes
Where to Watch: In theaters Nov. 14
Grade: B+
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