Travelling can be a real pain, especially with group tours. The fellow travellers along for the ride with cousins David and Benji Kaplan are practically saints when it comes to patience. Benji (Kieran Culkin) is especially a trial. He’s an exasperating endurance test that never shuts up. That nobody punches him or tells him off may be one of the boldest suspensions of disbelief committed to film.
A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s sophomore feature as a director, coalesces everything that’s awful about travel. The exhaustion, the commuting, the cost, the emotional tolls. Plus there are also factors of hypocrisy and privilege, but, worst of all: other people. If one can survive all those things, however, the journey merits any momentary displeasures. This is all to say that A Real Pain is about as fun as a trip to Auschwitz and, in some ways, just as enlightening.
Emotions run high as Benji and David (Jesse Eisenberg) embark on a pilgrimage to trace their late Polish grandmother’s survival of the Holocaust. He’s a wreck and was very close to his grandmother, so he isn’t taking the trip well before it even begins. Eisenberg uses elements of the road movie and the buddy comedy to create a thoughtfully challenging coming-of-middle-age tale. The two leads have excellent chemistry and boldly invite viewers to join the cousins on a ride that seems like a breeze, yet is anything but.
David arrives at the airport in a typically Eisenberg-esque flurry of nerves, but Benji’s cool and collected, having already been there for hours. One immediately begins to wonder if Benji is unemployed and unhoused, but one thing’s clear: his smooth-talking confidence is a façade. There are tells everywhere as Benji friendlifies everything. He painstakingly tries to hold himself together and keep himself from falling apart. Even when the cousins get their first meeting with the tour group, Benji dismisses them as geriatrics, yet they gaze in wonder at this prophetic young man instead of rolling their eyes.
It probably helps, too, that Benji’s fellow travellers get where he’s coming from. After all, they’re on a Holocaust tour. It’s one of those strange, if essential, rites of passages for travellers in Europe, particularly anyone from the Jewish diaspora whose own lives are credited to their elders’ survival. Auschwitz selfies, five star hotels, and gas chambers inevitably make for a surreal experience when revisiting the footsteps of departed relatives who endured the camps, as well as those who never made it out.
The cousins offer a complicated portrait of guilt passed down between generations. Most people on this trip, save for the not-Jewish tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), have experienced the emotions that Benji’s working out. Benji, for one, feels that he’s letting his late grandmother down by not doing more with his life. David, on the other hand, has the predictable “normal” and “successful” life with an adequately boring job that pays the bills, a wife, a kid, and a house. David’s an anxiety-riddled mess, yes, but to Benji, he’s a mirror that lets him see his perceived shortcomings.
As the group soldiers on, admiring touristy destinations throughout Poland, Benji becomes something of a group mascot even though, logically, he should be driving them berserk. The retired couple, Mark and Diane (David Oreskes and Liza Sadovy) endure him politely while Benji eggs David on to pose for a photo with a statue of soldiers. He fashions a Holocaust tour version of the photo that travellers take with the Leaning Tower of Pisa with one hand seemingly propping it up. David resists and instead becomes the group photographer as the Midwestern couple begrudgingly joins the impromptu photo shoot. So too does Rwandan-Canadian genocide survivor, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who doesn’t share Benji’s specific pain but identifies with the sense of loss and survivor’s remorse. Ditto divorced MILF Marcia (Jennifer Grey, terrific in a small but memorable role), whose inherent sadness fascinates Benji.
It’s all very cringe as the group poses at the monument. But Eisenberg leaves it to the viewer to decide if this collective effort to comfort Benji is more or less cringe-worthy than David’s insistence on being a wet blanket. One cousin evokes a blender of emotions without the lid on. The other seems unmoved by the journey.
Benji’s ambivalent relationship to his right to enjoy life worsens as the trip progresses. While travelling across the country, he remarks to the group that it feels strange—fucked up, even—that a group of Jews are travelling in business class on a train in Poland. Everyone just wants to enjoy their breakfast, though, instead of dwelling on the ghosts that crossed these tracks before them. Some people just want to eat croissants in peace.
It doesn’t help, either, that James’s milquetoast fashion for guiding the tour reduces the Holocaust to statistics. Benji takes it upon himself to do the heavy lifting and engage people with honouring the spirits they’re there to remember. He wants them to acknowledge that their memory is a blessing and not a fact to be regurgitated.
Eisenberg, moreover, lets the power of the locations convey the weight that Benji carries. The trip eventually arrives at the eerie destination of Majdanek. The concentration camp sits just five minutes from the city center of Lublin. It’s where their grandmother suffered alongside thousands of people, all within earshot of neighbouring Poles. Benji, thankfully, shuts up here. Instead, Culkin summons every one of his character’s supressed emotions to the surface. Someone’s rarely looked as alone as Benji does here when confronted with the reality that his guardian grandmother, who endured pure hell, is never coming back. But the trip is also a reality check for perspective.
It’s a very mature performance from Culkin, who injects Benji with the boisterous comedic ticks that audiences have become the actor’s trademark from Igby Goes Down to Succession. But the vulnerability and raw display of grief add a new layer: this is a brilliant, nuanced consideration of mental health, guilt, and generational trauma. Benji’s often performing and Culkin’s willingness to make the character so intolerably annoying yet endearing ultimately makes even the most cynical viewer warm up to him, just as travellers on the tour group do. For a character who seems incapable of shutting his mouth, Culkin says more with Benji when silence overtakes him and he can’t wear the brave face.
A Real Pain juggles a subtle whirlwind of complex emotions as the cousins assess their personal problems against their grandmother’s struggles. It’s an assured directorial effort from Eisenberg that takes some warming up to, but yields rewards in retrospect. The actor/director thoughtfully invites audiences to share his own act of working out anxieties comparable to Benji’s trials. A Real Pain takes a slice from Eisenberg’s own family history as David and Benji bring their grandmother’s story full circle. They visit the home she was forced to leave before being transferred to Majdanek.
The small, humble apartment in Kranystaw also happens to be the former home of Eisenberg’s aunt, who was displaced during the Holocaust. David and Benji place rocks on the stoop, finally affording A Real Pain some much-needed levity, as the film culminates in a great sense of release. In telling this story, but also ceding the spotlight to Culkin and making A Real Pain a collective exploration rather than merely a personal one, Eisenberg’s made something of many aunties should be proud. Even if they’ll want to deliver a few slaps along the way.
