A Real Pain

Leave it to Jesse Eisenberg to create a scene partner for himself who is so insufferable that his character comes off like the guy you'd prefer to hang out with. Kieran Culkin plays this showier role in Eisenberg's sophomore effort as writer/director. The two actors, each now in their early forties, play formerly close mismatched cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), who try to reconnect by taking an ancestry tour through Poland in honor of their beloved Holocaust survivor grandmother. The two cousins are, of course, a study in opposites, and they are, of course, very much on-brand avatars for the actors playing them. Eisenberg's David is an uptight bundle of nerves and resentments, utterly unsure of himself and terrified of saying the wrong thing. Culkin's Benji is a filterless, seemingly open charmer whose peace and love exterior is a thin veneer covering deep insecurities, hostilities, pain, trauma, and hopelessness. We spend more time with them than anyone probably would want to, but we also get to experience them through the eyes of their fellow tour group members. These supporting players are a well-cast bunch who do their best with limited roles.

The adventure through Warsaw and the Majdanek concentration camp causes the cousin's lifelong tensions and unspoken feelings to bubble up to the surface, leading to several confrontations. For the most part, these scenes are well-written and well-performed. The biggest exception is a lengthy monologue Eisenberg gives his character to deliver to the tour group after one of Benji's explosive mood swings causes him to leave the table. This speech is staged with a long, slow push-in on David as he rattles off all his fears and feelings about Benji and himself. It's the kind of moment I might be forgiving about when I see it in an inexperienced director's first feature that I've been enjoying up to that point, but coming from Eisenberg and centering on Eisenberg, it pulled me out of the story and made me a little hostile to the film. Still, the picture recovers well enough, and by the end, it ends up an accurate dual character study of guys who most of us have had in our lives in one form or another.

It was interesting to see this movie at a festival immediately following Mike Leigh's Hard Truths, another comedy that turns darkly dramatic about a chronically unhappy individual who makes life miserable for those who care about them. Marianne Jean-Baptiste's complex characterization in Hard Truths and the way the supporting cast of that film copes with her crippling unhappiness is more riveting than watching Culkin and Eisenberg's dudes dealing with their individual and joint mental health issues. But A Real Pain tells a complete and ultimately moving story, which, coming after Hard Truths, was much appreciated by a narrative obsessive like me.