Something Real

On Jesse Eisenberg's A Real Pain

Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Jesse Eisenberg) in a still from A Real Pain

2024 was not a good year for movies. I found last year’s Best Picture slate interesting enough to do a whole review sampler. Could the movies be coming back, I wondered? Alas, this year was back to Hollywood’s usual business of trying to make me care about films I haven’t seen and have no desire to see. I watched Dune 2 in theaters (decent) and Conclave on a plane (forgettable), and that was all.

However, one bright spot was Jesse Eisenberg’s little gem A Real Pain, a remarkable triple hat trick of writing, directing, and acting for the Social Network star. Eisenberg was nominated for Best Screenplay, and co-star Kieran Culkin walked away with Best Supporting Actor. The tightly scripted film follows two mismatched Jewish cousins on a heritage tour of Poland. Once joined at the hip, they’ve drifted apart in adulthood but are reunited to make the trip with inheritance money from their late beloved grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Thus flung together, they make a lovable odd couple—David (Eisenberg), a hyper-conscientious family man who takes pills for OCD, and Benji (Culkin), a charismatic stoner who bobs and weaves through life with no filter and no plans, yet somehow gets away with it. David is emotionally guarded, while Benji laughs and cries at the drop of a hat, full of angst about how exactly one is supposed to feel on a Holocaust tour. It is, after all, a tour about pain. But really, both cousins are in pain. One just conceals it better than the other.

Culkin’s soulful performance made a clean awards sweep on his way to the Oscars, though some argued that he was sand bagging, given that he and Eisenberg really co-lead the film. (Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for Rain Man in a performance with comparable screentime.) Then again, in a year where a man was nominated for Best Actress, this feels like a comparatively minor complaint. Culkin is “having a moment,” as the kids say, between this role and his role as playboy billionaire Roman Roy in Succession. He’s also a rare Hollywood star who appears to have a stable, wholesome family life. Everyone was charmed by his acceptance speech holding his wife to a playful promise that she would give him a fourth child if he won an Oscar. I find the idea of “gating” children behind awards milestones a bit off-putting to even joke about, but Culkin was so boyishly eager that he made it work, and knowing his dark family history adds a poignant layer. In fact, Culkin is such a family man that he nearly backed out of the film once he realized it was leaving him no break after shooting for Succession. In that respect, he resembles David more than Benji, though he shares Benji’s unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness presentation.

Eisenberg wrote elements of his own neuroticism into both characters, initially picturing himself as Benji. Somewhat like Benji, Eisenberg struggles with angst around “tragedy tours,” though he’s strangely drawn to them. This story was sparked by an advertisement for an Auschwitz tour, “with lunch.” We instinctively cringe, but then again, “Auschwitz tour, with fasting” would be its own kind of cringe. It’s cringe if you do and cringe if you don’t, and that’s just the complicated tension Eisenberg has captured.

At the heart of the film is the profound question of whose pain “matters,” in a historic or a cosmic sense. We build memorials and organize tours around the Holocaust to honor the victims’ great suffering, their great pain. But 80 years from now, all our own quotidian, sad little pains will be swept into the dustbin of time and forgotten. No tour guide will lead small groups to a well-kept grave and intone, “Here lies Benji, whose grandmother survived the Holocaust only for her favorite grandson to waste his prime years passed out on a couch in his mom’s basement. RIP.” This is the brutal truth lurking under the cousins’ light banter, waiting for its moment to surface.