A Real Pain
Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin
More actors than ever are now stepping behind the camera to take a shot at directing. Most of them are just OK at it, but then there’s that elite tier of actors — Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck, Bradley Cooper — who turn out to be born filmmakers. To that hallowed company we can now add Jesse Eisenberg. “A Real Pain,” which he wrote, directed and co-stars in, premiered last week at Sundance, and it’s a delight and a revelation — a deft, funny, heady, beautifully staged ramble of a road movie about two Jewish cousins, David and Benji Kaplan (played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), who are taking what someone calls a group “Holocaust tour” of Poland. The two also plan to seek out the home their grandmother grew up in.
“A Real Pain” is full of blustery talk about a great many things, and the suffering embedded in Jewish history — the way the past speaks to the present — is one of them. But only one. Eisenberg plays David as a vintage Jesse character, earnest and uptight, with a compressed delivery that expresses his nervous nature. David lives in New York with his wife and adorable tyke of a son, and emotionally he’s bit of a lox, but he has it together. It was his idea to take a week off to do this trip, which he’s arranged and paid for, mostly so he can spend quality time with Benji (Culkin), the cousin he grew up with and was close to (their fathers were brothers), though the two have drifted apart.
If David is a middle-class drone, Benji is a loose cannon — a bro who never grew up, the kind of dude who says “fuck” every fifth word, who advance-mails a parcel of weed to his hotel in Poland, and who has no filter when it comes to his thoughts and feelings. The two are thrown in with the half-adozen other members of the tour group, all of whom are strait-laced and middle-aged. That makes Benji the antic bomb-thrower and wild card, which is his comfort zone. He jokes and jabbers and interrupts and says inappropriate bro-y things. Yet he’s charismatic. People are drawn to the wit of his selfcentered energy.
Culkin, for all his crack timing, is not giving a “comedy” performance. He’s doing a sensational piece of acting as a compulsive wiseacre addicted to the ways of one-upmanship. Culkin makes him real, and the movie, which Eisenberg has scripted with an ear for the music of ideas and for contrasting voices, presents the story of these cousins — how they interact, what they mean to each other, how their past intersects with the present — in a way that’s so supple you can touch their reality.
Things turn more dramatic when the tour group hops a silver train into the Polish countryside. They all have first-class tickets, and Benji starts ranting about how offensive this is given what trains meant to Jews during the Holocaust. He can be a scold, but the fast-talking action starts to melt into a meditation on our relationship to the past. Benji, the most arrested person on hand but also the most thoughtful, keeps insisting on the primacy of history. The complex way the movie views him is that his perception gives him soul, even as he’s unable to apply it to his own life. Eisenberg, I predict, is going to have a major career as a filmmaker. As for Culkin, “A Real Pain” establishes that now that “Succession” is over, his fast-break insolence can work on the big screen in a huge way. The film’s final shot is a beauty, because the entire question raised by Culkin’s Benji — can he change and redeem himself? — is reflected, with haunting ambiguity, in his look. That’s stardom.