A Real Pain movie review and overview (2024)

We are all just tourists when it comes to someone else’s pain. This should not be interpreted as a dampener on the importance of compassion and empathy. On the contrary, they now seem more important than ever. But there are limits to how much we can truly put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Being a witness, being an ally, just being a shoulder to cry on – these are the things that connect us and make us human, but everyone has a different emotional language, based on years of experience, that we can absorb from the blows of the world but never fully speaking. This truth is at the heart of Jesse Eisenberg’s masterful “A Real Pain,” a story about two cousins ​​who travel to a place where unspeakable pain is inflicted on humanity as they battle their own personal demons. On the surface, it’s an oil-and-water story about two men who are practically brothers but have led remarkably different lives: one a rushing fountain of emotions, the other living through more traditional patterns of existence. Both men want to be like the other. Eisenberg’s film movingly and brilliantly understands how they cannot.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) have booked a trip to Poland to learn how the Holocaust affected the region through the lens of a visit to their grandmother’s birthplace. Grandma is a survivor herself and recently passed away, leaving her BFF Benji in one of those emotionally rudderless chapters we all face at different points in our lives. The cousins, who are so close in age that they’re practically brothers, join a traveling party led by the endearing James (Will Sharpe), which also includes four other travelers played by Jennifer Gray, Kurt Egiywan, Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes. Everyone here has the feeling that they already existed before arriving in Poland and that after completing the tour they will return to their lives. One of the many great things about Eisenberg’s excellent script is that he refuses to use the other tourists as emotional pawns. There is a much worse version of this movie that gives every tour member problems that Benji or David have to solve. And yet they are not just background information either: they enhance the overall verisimilitude of the piece.

Most people won’t notice, because they will be so entranced, but what the Emmy-winning Culkin does in this film. In easily one of the best performances of 2024, he plays a man we all know (or were at some point in our lives): the friend or family member we can’t stand under certain circumstances and yet secretly wish to be more alike. at its worst. Culkin is so raw and organic, portraying Benji in a way that never feels calculated. Despite spending hours watching him in “Succession,” the actor disappears into this role almost immediately, and we believe every choice he makes. He finds a way to convey an inner monologue that Benji may not even fully understand, but which comes out through his eyes, body language and tenor.

What really takes “A Real Pain” to the next level is that Eisenberg, the writer/director, never feels sorry for Benji, but he doesn’t put him on a pedestal either. He’s annoying. But he’s also not exactly wrong when he has an emotional outburst about the inconvenience of taking the train to a concentration camp, or lashes out at James for spouting facts instead of actually connecting with locals in the cities that they visit. That scene is a real highlight, a moment that distills the complexity in Benji’s emotionally raw existence. No one ever criticizes and informs the clearly likable and likeable James, making it easy to see Benji as a troublemaker, but he’s just being honest about his emotional response to what’s happening around him. Where’s the mistake in that? Why are so few of us willing to express those difficult emotions? Isn’t burying it the real cause of pain?

Culkin’s performance will be the touchstone for this film’s adoration, but Eisenberg’s work as a director and writer should not be overlooked. He uses music beautifully and subtly, memorably dropping his score out of the mix as the tour takes place through a concentration camp, a place where the silence says so much more. He perfectly shapes his film’s relatively small story and distills it down to a 90-minute production that doesn’t contain any fat, but also feels completely complete. He films Poland with respect and admiration, without succumbing to the travelogue approach of traveling Americans that can derail a film like this. Every time “A Real Pain” threatens to become maudlin or maudlin, Eisenberg’s choices undermine it.

And that grounding is what makes it so powerful. Ultimately, it’s about two people who have grown apart because their lives have gone in such different directions. But they still love each other. You feel it in every frame. David has a wife and a child he misses at home, but he fears that Benji will return to loneliness, even though he is the first person to make friends in a new location, someone who is genuinely interested and involved in the stories of others. In just 90 minutes we get to know David and Benji as if they were our own friends or cousins. Even if we cannot fully feel their emotions, we see our own elements in them. It is a powerful feeling to witness art that reminds us that all aspects of our existence are valuable, especially our pain.