Watching Jesse Eisenberg’s feature directorial follow-up to When You Finish Saving the World in A Real Pain the day after Donald J. Trump was re-elected as President of the United States felt quite cathartic. After the year’s bleakest day, going to a film screening whose central premise reminds audiences that it’s OK not to be OK felt like something this critic (and I believe many others) needed to hear. Perhaps it could deter those looking to escape the confines of this dreary world destined to die on its own. However, the necessary confrontation Eisenberg proposes in 90 minutes has made this film far more relevant than its initial statement.
Of course, one can’t draw real-life events to a movie that has nothing to do with current events in the ‘interesting times’ we live in. However, many people are now suffering due to the consequences this Presidential election has brought on the United States and the rest of the world. Some have adopted a façade to reassure their friends, family members, or work colleagues that they are doing fine but are instead hiding layers upon layers of pain that they attempt to suppress daily.
This is the case for our central protagonists, cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin), who reunite for a historical tour throughout Poland after their grandmother’s passing. Their reunion is initially met with trepidation and excitement – the two haven’t seen each other for a long time, and we quickly see how they respond to their behavior patterns even if their states are diametrically opposed. Much like Finn Wolfhard’s character in When You Finish Saving the World was a younger version of Eisenberg, the writer/director essentially plays himself as David, for a while at least.
We find the same quirkiness and wry sense of humor that his most famous performances have made him known for, but with an added layer of emotional complexity never-before-seen from him. Honestly, I was never a fan of Eisenberg’s fast-talking, repressively emotional turns, particularly when he was woefully miscast as Lex Luthor in the otherwise great Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. However, as David begins to break down and reveal a side of him that he never allowed himself to put forward on screen, his performance becomes a revelation, almost as if he always thought he needed to adopt the façade he’s been acting in for more than a decade.
But with complete control in the director’s chair, he can now discuss what he’s always wanted to wrestle with, whether through his protagonist or, more importantly, Benji. From the outside, he has an entirely different personality than David: extroverted, full of life, attempting to please everyone and get to know the people he will surround himself with during the tour guided by James (Will Sharpe).
Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin in A REAL PAIN. Photo Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures, © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.
He also wants David to “loosen up” a bit with the rigid shackles he’s locked himself in, whether it’s smoking weed on the roof of a hotel or traveling on a train without a ticket and strategically hiding from an officer. David initially refuses to do all this, especially when train tickets in Poland don’t cost an arm and a leg. But Benji’s more freewheeling personality encourages him and the people on the tour to think differently and consider the implications of their actions and behavior.
In an earlier scene, before the two travel inside a train without a ticket, Benji calls out James for sitting the passengers in first class, all Jewish, headed on a train to Poland. Benji is seemingly the only person to realize that this tour isn’t about ‘just’ historically walking through the country but reckoning with what the community has suffered through ever since the Holocaust. He confronts these ideals head-on and encourages James to be more compassionate toward the people who have sadly suffered or lost their lives during this harrowing genocide.
It’s there that A Real Pain becomes something far more than a traditional buddy comedy or travelogue movie. Its initial introductory steps are treated in that vein. Still, Eisenberg begins to transcend these trappings into a more emotionally active picture, where Benji’s broken emotions slowly reveal themselves to David and the rest of the group. In that regard, Culkin’s turn as Benji is the best of his career. It’s an initially funny, rambunctious portrayal of a broken character that had the audience in stitches when he suddenly reacts to words spoken by other tour group members and immediately wins their hearts.
However, as the film progresses and Eisenberg slowly taps into a darker side of Benji, ultimately revealing a secret that completely changes our perception of the character, Culkin’s expressions also change. They become far more painful than his dynamic exterior posited himself as. We also begin to reassess what we saw within David and Benji’s chemistry. As his shoulders are slumped on a piano while reflexively playing a song, we think of how his actions were always like this, but we couldn’t necessarily perceive why he was so in our faces.
We couldn’t hear his cry for help because he didn’t want us to see it, but we immediately realize how lonely and broken he is the more Michał Dymek’s camera lingers on his face. There’s something in him that gradually brings us closer to the truth when Benji is forced to confront his beliefs and the horrors that have perpetuated his mind for so long. It then becomes clear when Eisenberg shifts tonalities and puts the tour group inside a concentration camp, in which the film’s melodically charming score and upbeat progression abruptly stops. Silence now becomes the single most potent tool Eisenberg has in his box to make us feel what each character is experiencing until the agonizing pain is too much to hold into that Culkin breaks into a puddle of increasingly vulnerable tears that get more gut-wrenching as we watch him.
This difficult shift is daring for a comedy that starts in a rather crowd-pleasing and conventional route. Still, it’s part of the reason why Eisenberg’s film feels so necessary in the enshittificated times we currently live in. It may seem like a facile criticism to say that “this is what the world needs to see right now” because no one knows what the world truly feels in an era that grows much darker than we believe it will be.
However, A Real Pain felt like the cathartic experience that most need to see and remind themselves that it’s fine to be broken. It’s fine not to feel good, to feel desperate, and worried about the future, not only for ourselves but for the next generation. The world is soul-crushing. Our existence living in a place solely born out of suffering and pain will never bring us any form of tangible reward. Benji knows this. David knows this. The two get by and attempt to find stability in a world that consistently shifts in the wrong direction. But is it enough? Eisenberg doesn’t know, as illustrated by A Real Pain’s final shot of Benji sitting alone at the airport, wondering what’s next for him.
No one knows what will happen next. Benji understands this. However, we can try to make the most of this body and world we’re graced in before it all ends. Perhaps that’s what he will do – and that’s what you should do, either. I don’t have a crystal ball. I can’t tell you what will happen tomorrow. That doesn’t mean I won’t try to live as long as possible in this world and hope to achieve a form of meaning. It may seem like a futile endeavor. It probably is. But if Benji will try, so will I, and so should you.
A Real Pain is now playing in select theatres and will be released wide on November 15.
