Jesse Eisenberg Writes, Directs, and Produces a Warsaw-set Dramedy Showcase for Kieran Culkin.
DIRECTED BY JESSE EISENBERG/2024
Meet Benji Kaplan, an unlaunched millennial dude with unregulated big feelings and a lack of social boundaries. For his cousin David- a level-headed dullard with a young family- he’s a real pain.
It’s been a while since Benji and David properly hung out- maybe too long, depending on which of them you ask. Perhaps overcompensating, they decide to make up for lost time by traveling together to the land of their Jewish heritage, Warsaw, Poland. Having recently lost their grandmother, their plan is to find her childhood home and pay tribute to her. Also, it’s the perfect opportunity to see a concentration camp and other historical sites pertinent to her Holocaust survival story. An impressively noble purpose for such a trip, to be sure. But will David’s (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji’s (Kieran Culkin) relationship (such as it’s been) remain intact?
To get around Warsaw in an informed manner, they’ve signed up to be a part of an organized guided tour. The tour guide, James (Will Sharpe) is the semi-ridged type who’s done this route maybe a few too many times. All too often, he’s leading his small group of tourists through the motions. Benji, though, isn’t having it. He didn’t come all this way for a rote experience. His ill-timed outburst at James is just one of such instances in which David wishes he could just crawl into a hole. Later, during a fancy meal, the whole group (including Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes) can’t help but chat about Benji while he’s away from the table.
Though A Real Pain is written, directed, and produced by Eisenberg, it’s Kieran Culkin who dominates the dramedy’s proceedings. In Culkin’s hands, the repressive foul-mouthed pothead Benji pops to life as a fully formed ne’er-do-well of the American here-and-now. Yet, beyond his most insufferable moments, we come to recognize his human value amid his sensibilities, as internalized and also externalized as they can often be. The pain he feels is real- both deep-seated and reactive on the fly. The culmination of the tour, a visit to a concentration camp, understandably breaks him. (A Real Pain is, in fact, said to be the first narrative film allowed to shoot inside an actual concentration camp. Eisenberg wisely quiets the proceedings for a few minutes as his camera engages the ghostly surroundings and remnants).
A Real Pain is no aesthetic wonder, as Eisenberg seems content to present an as-is version of Warsaw and its surrounding areas. Perhaps as compensation, he isn’t above including a Midnight in Paris-esque postcard-y montage of sites worth seeing. The choice of a using classical piano cues by Fryderyk Chopin for the score rather than any contemporary rock n’ roll or whatnot is the film’s most overt tell of just how outside the box A Real Pain is. Eisenberg’s film presents as an unassuming travelogue, but in fact explores legitimate generational trauma and all-too-common mental strife that most other movies either sidestep or only touch upon. It’s all the more impressive that this is only Eisenberg’s second outing as a director. In only ninety minutes, A Real Pain goes places that all too often remain untreated.
