Film Review: A mercurial Kieran Culkin shines in the dexterity of Jesse Eisenberg, accomplished ‘A Real Pain’

It’s part comedy, part tragedy. It’s part road trip saga, part strange couples movie, and part Holocaust film. What could have gone wrong?

Yes, anything could have gone wrong. So the first miracle over “A real pain,” Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s remarkably accomplished film about mismatched cousins ​​on a bleak journey through Poland is how he achieves the most delicate of balancing acts.

That it does this while also asking intriguing questions about the nature of pain – personal versus universal, historical versus contemporary – is all the more impressive. This also applies to the fact that it shows an Oscar-worthy performance.

That stunning performance comes from Kieran Culkin, and what’s striking is that it doesn’t overpower the rest of the ensemble. This is primarily a testament to the careful way in which Eisenberg, who stars in the less flashy role, has constructed and paced his film. And as for Culkin, if you need proof that his searing, Emmy-winning work as tortured Roman Roy in “Succession” wasn’t a fluke, here you have it.

The movie, that is only Eisenberg’s second directorial effortstems from a trip the “Social Network” star took to Poland about twenty years ago. There he found the small house where his aunt had lived before the Holocaust uprooted the family. He wondered what his own life would have been like if World War II had never happened.

And that’s one of the many conversations David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) have as they travel through Poland on a mission to visit the house where their grandmother, who recently passed away, once lived. (Eisenberg used the exact same house, which tells you how personal this film was to him.)

It’s a poignant yet awkward reunion for the cousins, who were close as young people but are on a very different path as adults in their forties. David is the angst-ridden but highly functional type that the actor Eisenberg excels at; he works in technology and lives with his wife and son in Brooklyn. As for Benji, he lives in the state and is largely uneducated or undeveloped. He’s also an explorer of contrasts – the type, David notes, who can light up a room when he walks in, and then laugh at everyone. The death of their grandmother, with whom Benji was close, has taken a toll on his mental health.

The cousins ​​meet for the first time at the New York airport. Before they even get through security, Benji scares the hell out of David by telling him he got some really good weed for the road. (Don’t worry, he emailed it to the hotel.)

In Warsaw they meet their small tour group and British guide James (Will Sharpe, from “The White Lotus”), a scholar from wartime Poland. Fellow travelers include Marsha (Jennifer Gray), a divorcee who has moved east from LA and is trying to reconnect with her past; a Midwestern couple (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy); and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan-Canadian convert to Judasim who knows something about genocide.

In short, Benji charms and irritates the group – and this turbulent charisma is Culkin’s specialty.

At a war memorial, he runs forward to strike a playful action pose, embarrassing David. But somehow the entire group joins Benji in the childish stunt, and David continues to take pictures.

When the tour then boards the train to Lublin, Benji suddenly explodes in anger at the group – how can they sit in first-class comfort when their ancestors were locked up in cattle wagons 80 years ago? He disappears into a lower class car.

And during a visit to a wartime gravestone, Benji angrily admonishes the mild-mannered guide for focusing on statistics and not letting the group feel the raw emotion of the moment. (He’s not wrong, as the guide will later acknowledge.)

Eisenberg has said that while conceiving his film, he was struck by a Polish advertisement promising “Holocaust tours (with lunch).” All these moments feel very real; Indeed, such tours are filled with uncomfortable (and rather unavoidable) combinations of modern tourist comforts and historical horrors.

Speaking of horrors, the most difficult scenes come when the group visits Majdanek, the Nazi camp. There they walk past unspeakable sights of gas chambers and ovens and piles of abandoned shoes. You might initially gasp that Eisenberg is leading us here at all; wisely he keeps these moments quiet. When Benji breaks down, he’s on his way home – an acknowledgment that such reactions often come later.

At the end, as the cousins ​​say an awkward goodbye at the same airport where we started, having completed a journey both physical and personal, it’s hard not to think back to the film’s title. Yes, Benji is “a real pain.” But there are layers of pain at play here.

There is David’s very real pain, a fear that forces him to take pills every day. There is Benji’s pain, which not long ago sent him into a very dangerous downward spiral.

But, Eisenberg seems to wonder, how “valid” are these kinds of pains, when set against the historical pain the film explores in Poland – a place where, as his camera shows empty streets where life once teemed, a very people were exterminated by the Nazis?

It’s quite a journey for one film. All credit to Eisenberg, and his stellar co-star, for making the road trip so thought-provoking.

“A Real Pain,” a Searchlight Pictures release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for language and some drug use. “ Playing time: 90 minutes. Three stars out of four.