Kieran Culkin, left, and Jesse Eisenberg star in "A Real Pain." Searchlight Pictures
"A Real Pain" is a comedy about the places people put their most unimaginable sorrows. It's a buddy movie - actually, a variant thereof, a cousin movie - and it stars Jesse Eisenberg, who wrote and directed, and Kieran Culkin, who slips the shade of Roman Roy and comes into his own as a Puck for our times, damaged, defeated and somehow defiant. It's also one of the very best movies of the year.
The cousins are David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin), respectively industrious ant and slacker grasshopper, and they are on a Holocaust tour in Poland. David is a married Brooklynite, with a loving wife, an adored young son and a respectable job selling ads on the internet. Benji has spent much of the past few years getting high in his mother's basement.
The two are taking the tour to honor their late grandmother, who escaped the Nazis during World War II and whose childhood home they intend to spend their last day visiting. That's a lot to put on the plate of one movie, yet Eisenberg, in an impressive leap forward from his 2022 writing-directing debut, "When You Finish Saving the World," balances laughter, tears and an empathy for the different demons that can haunt families and history.
The cousins aren't alone in their sojourn but are part of a package tour led by an agreeably somber young British historian (Will Sharpe), who takes the small group through the Jewish quarters and Holocaust memorials of various Polish towns before visiting the Majdanek concentration camp outside Lublin. Joining the cousins are an older couple from Shaker Heights, Ohio (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy); a divorced New York woman (Jennifer Grey); and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide (Kurt Egyiawan) who has converted to Judaism.
Among other things, "A Real Pain" is a comedy of discomfort because Benji is both fully alive in the moment and incredibly hard to take. An unfiltered oversharer, he can lighten the mood by posing for goofy photos at war memorials - and getting everyone but David to join in - or bring everyone down with guilt over being Jews traveling through Poland on first-class train tickets. He's the kind of human wild card who, in his cousin's words, "lights up every room he comes into - and then takes a (expletive) in it."
From left, Kurt Egyiawan, Will Sharpe, Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg as a group touring Poland in "A Real Pain." Searchlight Pictures
Culkin walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it's a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness. Benji and David have grown up as close as brothers, with Benji especially attached to their grandmother; her recent loss seems to have cast him farther out to sea. In a bigger, more commercial version of this movie, he might be played (and played well) by Zach Galifianakis, but Culkin grounds the role in the complex charm and confusion of a gifted boy for whom adulthood hasn't really panned out. Most men know a Benji - the childhood friend who got lost in the wilderness and never made it back - and they measure their own lives by how close they might have come to being him.
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(I've seen "A Real Pain" three times now, the first with an appreciative festival audience, the second with a spouse who found the experience like being stuck at a family dinner next to an especially irritating relative, and the third with two guy friends - brothers - who intuitively understood the film's crosscurrents of loyalty, enmity, aggravation and concern. Make of that what you will.)
If Benji is the embarrasser, David is the embarrassee - always observing the social niceties, always chagrined when people respond more genuinely to Benji's messy passion. The part is well within Eisenberg's established persona of chatty neurosis, but the setting and the knowingly written dialogue give David's self-consciousness greater weight and more rueful humor than usual. His is the tragedy of the successful but ordinary man.
A much larger tragedy looms in the background of "A Real Pain," obviously, moving to the foreground at Benji's insistence when he objects to the tour guide's glib recitation of factoids or in a long, silent walk through the death camp, its banal quiet an affront to the memory of what happened there. The conflict between the two cousins doesn't diminish this history but, instead, challenges us. How DO you get your mind and heart and soul around such an immense obscenity? By taking it in quietly like David or by mourning it with every fiber of your flawed being like Benji? Does either reaction have the power to stop it from ever happening again? These are not idle, irrelevant questions.
I should note that the only music we hear on the soundtrack throughout are the piano pieces of Frédéric Chopin, a fellow Pole whose melodies form a kind of aural tapestry commemorating the Before Times, when the Jewish quarters bustled with life and the Benjis of this world still believed that goodness could save them.
The title of "A Real Pain" radiates in multiple directions, historical and existential, personal and interpersonal, on-screen and off. The anguish and love it hints at are as present to the cousins as the grandmother's house at which they finally arrive. By no coincidence at all, it's the house that Jesse Eisenberg's own grandmother once called home.
Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr's Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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'A REAL PAIN'
4 stars
RATED: R. Contains language throughout and some drug use.
RUNNING TIME: 90 minutes
AVAILABLE: In theaters
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