R | 1h 30m | Drama, Comedy, History | 2024
Written, co-produced, starring, and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, the mismatched buddy road flick, “A Real Pain,” is a marked improvement on his only so-so 2023 feature directorial debut, “When You Finish Saving the World.”
A poignant and heartfelt drama mixed with healthy doses of biting humor, “A Real Pain” owes a great deal in tone and execution to “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles,” the 1987 John Hughes road comedy film starring Steve Martin and John Candy.
In “A Real Pain,” Eisenberg (as David) is the Martin character: an uptight, tightly-wound, overly serious guy who likes things to be orderly and tidy. Co-lead Kieran Culkin plays David’s Candy-flavored (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun) cousin Benji who is everything David isn’t.
A Polish Road Trip
At David’s urging, the cousins head out from New York City to Poland for a “Heritage Tour” with four other Jews where they'll visit significant locations associated with the Holocaust. Other travelers include Marcia (Jennifer Grey), an L.A.-based recent divorcee; the self-described “boring” married couple Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Liza Sadovy); and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan who recently converted to Judaism. The tour is being led by the orderly British-born James (Will Sharpe).The main point of the trip (from David’s perspective) is to visit the home of his and Benji’s grandmother, who fled Poland just before the Nazis took over. This stop isn’t part of the official tour, and the cousins separate from the rest of the group in the middle of the third act.
Clocking in at an economic and very lean 90 minutes, Eisenberg displays great growth as a filmmaker by employing superb narrative shorthand, especially in the first act.
The movie opens with David leaving multiple voicemails for Benji on his way to the airport. He receives no replies. As it turns out, Benji is already at the airport and doesn’t feel the need to reply. Their seating assignments on the plane have David with a window seat and Benji a middle seat, yet Benji assumes the window seat. David doesn’t protest, but he’s bothered.
When they arrive at their Polish hotel, David can’t wait to take a shower, but at the last second, Benji jumps ahead of him and commandeers David’s phone to listen to music in the bathroom because Benji’s phone doesn’t have a music app. Again, David grudgingly acquiesces while doing a simmering slow burn.
Let It Slide
David chooses to let the little things slide. The trip was his idea and he’d rather let Benji have his way in the interest of harmony. This mindset reaches critical mass when the group arrives at a massive memorial statue depicting World War II Polish soldiers.Benji wants to be photographed while posing in front of the statue in a semi-comic way, something David finds abhorrent and in bad taste. Not only does Benji go through with it, but he also cajoles the rest of the group to join in, leaving David to capture the event on six smart phones. This is the point where Eisenberg the writer impressed me the most.
Eisenberg crafted Benji to be the free spirit David could never be; he made Benji the “cool kid” and Eisenberg’s David the stick in the mud. This struck me as a remarkably unselfish move on Eisenberg’s part. He was willing to play the party pooper while bolstering Benji’s appeal to the group as a whole.
A Narrative Shift
Without giving anything away, there’s a shift of sorts at the midway point, where the real Benji begins to surface. He goes from happy-go-lucky to quickly bothered, petty, and easily triggered for the most minor of reasons. In the movie’s second-best scene, David (without Benji present) reveals to the group events in Benji’s recent past; this explains Benji’s jarring shift in demeanor, yet David does so with familial love, class, and bottomless affection.The movie’s high water emotional mark takes place when the group visits the Majdanek concentration camp late in the third act. Eisenberg was beyond wise to keep the dialogue during this stretch down to a bare minimum. The visuals are dedicated to reaction shots of the cast looking at disturbing images, instead of the actual images (gas chambers, ovens).
These were brilliant editorial choices made by Eisenberg the director and are on par with similar passages found in Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” and “Schindler’s List.”
Eisenberg pulled off a minor miracle here. He melded the mismatched buddy road trip with an uncomfortable foreign land excursion, with—dare I say it—a Holocaust drama with more than impressive results. He did so while wearing four hats and keeping his ego firmly in check. Kudos and more to him.
