by Robert Bouffard, Editor
In a recent Vanity Fair interview promoting A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg calls director Kelly Reichardt, “The funniest person I have ever met who refuses to put a joke into her movie.” I bring this up because with his second directorial effort (When You Finish Saving the World being the first), Eisenberg, who starred in Reichardt’s excellent climate change thriller Night Moves, comes closer to capturing the spirit of Reichardt’s 2006 film, Old Joy, than anything else I’ve seen. A Real Pain, which Eisenberg also wrote, feels like a spin on the ideas of loneliness and lost time that appear in Old Joy, only Eisenberg takes his playful jab at Reichardt to heart and puts jokes in his movie.
Childhood cousins and best friends who have drifted apart in recent years as life has gotten in the way, David (Eisenberg, acting in his own movie for the first time) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), visit their grandmother’s childhood house in Poland, where she grew up and escaped the Holocaust; she left the cousins the money for the trip in her will. David is a bit uptight — as Eisenberg’s characters tend to be — but his life is put together, with a wife, young child, and a good (albeit boring) job that allows him to live in New York City. Benji, meanwhile, is eccentric and upfront. He’s the kind of guy whose energy can make people uncomfortable, but can also bring something out of then that they didn’t know was there. But he’s a bit of a drifter — his grandmother was his best friend, and he’s been lost and alone ever since she passed, which makes this excursion all the more significant.
And to take it a step further, they’re doing a Holocaust tour with four other Jewish people, and as the Gentile guide James (Will Sharpe) puts it, “This will be a tour about pain,” the film’s natural central idea. It’s also the perfect milieu for Benji’s bluntness, as it can make him a real pain in that he’s imploring his fellow tourists to feel a real pain. Essentially, the film is about two wayward souls living with the breadth of pain: Benji realizes this reality, and the weight of it might never escape him, while David spends so much time with the tunnel vision of living the perfect American life that when he comes face to face with Benji’s wistfulness, the tunnel vision shifts to him, and he still doesn’t do quite enough internal digging. But there’s a history and existential truth to this pain, with the Holocaust tour, which confronts the characters whether they want to be confronted or not.
In a way, Reichardt’s Joy and Eisenberg’s Pain go hand in hand. Even with the moments of lighting up a room or illuminating realities about people they wouldn’t otherwise recognize, Benji is deeply lost, and perhaps irreparably alone. So while life is worth living, it isn’t always going to work out for everyone; some people are stuck, cyclically helping others grow introspectively while unable to really help themselves.
This is a pretty brutal and upsetting message in a lot of ways, but it’s also respectable. Many similar movies would have cute, tidy endings, but A Real Pain, for lack of better terms, is raw and real. It’s honest about the way life and the world treat people who deserve more, but who can never quite access it. This is driven home by Culkin’s truly astonishing performance. There were glimpses of the vulnerability he can channel on Succession, particularly in that final season, but A Real Pain is much more grounded, in that Benji feels like the kind of person everyone knows at least one of. He wears his emotions on his sleeve, but his pain in his eyes (not to mention how straight-up funny he could be; the movie is also a laugh riot), and when Eisenberg’s direction bookends the film with closeups on his co-star’s face, those eyes say more than the fast-talking Benji ever could with his words. Put simply: Culkin far and away gives one of the best performances of the year.
And while operating both in front of and behind the camera, Eisenberg also gives a reliably good performance. For all the anxiety-riddled characters he’s played, David is perhaps the least self-aware to begin. As he slowly yet begrudgingly lets Benji back in, those walls begin to break down a bit more. But even by the end, he still has a somewhat troubling amount of growing to could do, but his more passive approach to life just won’t allow him to do it; ultimately, its existence affects the way Benji’s character is left off as well.
But it’s really in the direction and structure of the film where Eisenberg shines. Dialogue is left hanging in the air to be contemplated. Images are presented sometimes without comment to be digested. Characters are rich, and their relationships are dynamic and fluid. Those bookending shots of Culkin really sell the whole thing: Life is worth living and its relationships are worth having, but the pain that comes along with both of them is, for better or worse, essential as well.
Rating: Loved It
A Real pain is currently playing in theaters
You can read more from Robert Bouffard, and follow him on Letterboxd