Kieran Culkin shines brightly in Jesse Eisenberg’s ‘The Real Pain’
In Eisenberg's winning sophomore directorial effort, Culkin and Eisenberg play two very different types of Jewish guys visiting Poland.
The legacy of the Holocaust, and how it rains down the generations of American Jews, is a big topic at the movies this year.
Brady Corbet’s upcoming masterpiece The Brutalist touches on this, especially in its soon-to-be-much-argued-about ending. There are also not one but two movies this year about a pair of mismatched and bickering Jewish relatives visiting Holocaust sites in Poland while a light piano score plays in the background. The first was Treasure, starring Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham as a father and daughter; that film resembled the Toni Erdmann remake that Dunham was once hired to write but never happened.
The second movie with that premise, Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, is much better and more likely to be well-remembered. It stars Eisenberg himself and Kieran Culkin as David and Benji, a pair of Jewish cousins, close as children but with little in common as adults, who reconnect after the death of their survivor grandmother and pay a visit to her hometown in Poland and the camp where she was once imprisoned.
The two are very different types of men and specifically very different types of Jewish men: David is a neurotic New York Jew, with a wife and child and some degree of professional success, while Benji is a wisecracking loner with few prospects but a lot of attitude.
The rest of the group includes Baby herself, Jennifer Grey, as a recent divorcee, Will Sharpe (from The White Lotus) as the tour guide, Kurt Egyiawan as a Rwandan genocide survivor who moved to Canada and converted to Judaism, and Daniel Oreskes and Lisa Sadovy, as an older retired couple (I figured most tours of this kid are all retirees except for one or two young people, but…).
There’s much discussion, especially between the cousins, about their differences, their remembrance of their grandmother, and whether a Jew can ride a train in Poland without feeling uncomfortable about what that means.
There’s a lot of sadness, of course, but plenty of humor as well. I liked that there’s nothing in the dialogue about “generational trauma,” and that it’s all merely hinted at.
Both lead actors are outstanding, but the true standout is Culkin, who broke through the last few years on Succession and here plays a very different character and knocks it out of the park. (One woman in our screening complained about how much vulgarity came out of Benji’s mouth, and I hope for her sake she never becomes acquainted with Roman Roy.)
Culkin is not Jewish — his father was a Catholic Church sacristan — but he’s so damned good in this that the usual “Jewface” casting controversy hasn’t happened.
I did get the sense that some scenes were left out of the film. What was the relationship between their fathers, who were brothers, and what type of the relationship did they have? And I got the sense that some deleted scenes had more of Jennifer Grey’s character, who has little purpose in the film as it stands. However, I would watch a whole spinoff film about the Rwandan character, and his life story.
Eisenberg, like his character, is from New York but wears an Indiana University baseball cap throughout the film. I thought maybe he was adding an unspoken background to the character, as the sort of East Coast Jew who went to the Midwest for college but has stuck to New York City ever since. But in fact, the actor is an alum of the Bloomington Playwrights Project, has spent time living in Indiana, and even roots for the Pacers, rather than the Knicks (Eisenberg’s directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World was set in Indiana.)
When You Finish Saving the World killed at Sundance in 2022 but came out with barely a whimper a year later; it really wasn’t very good at all. A Real Pain was also a well-received Sundance debut, and is a much better film in every way.