Something to watch tonight: Monday 28 July
A Real Pain (Eisenberg, 2024)
Mentioning Will Sharpe last week in my recommendation of Giri/Haji on Netflix, I thought I would check on the whereabouts of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which features Sharpe as the guide for the Holocaust tour that Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin’s characters are on.
It’s slipped out quietly on Disney+ so if you have a subscription there (you know, for the kids) you’ll find one of the most thoughtful films of the last 12 months.
I reviewed it during my stint on At the Summer Movies earlier this year and, as that segment didn’t get turned into a written page, I include the whole thing below. As always, it’s worth a listen, as the clips really add so much.
In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s character David talks about how everyone’s life is already full of pain so why would you willingly go and seek out more of it?
The fact that he says that while he’s on a guided tour of Jewish history in Poland, centred around the devastation of the Holocaust, is ironic but, to be fair, he’s not there for himself. He is on this road trip with his aimless cousin Benji (played by Kieran Culkin). As children they were inseparable but as adults they have grown apart and Benji has been knocked for six by the death of their beloved grandmother, Dory.
She was a Polish Holocaust survivor – she survived because of a thousand miracles, David says – and this trip is a way for both cousins to honour her memory and hopefully reconnect with each other.
But the trip is also going to rip off the band aid on some deep intergenerational trauma. Both of them have it but are failing to deal with it in completely different ways. David, by throwing himself into a traditional middle-class life of career and family, and Benji by simply drifting through life in a haze of weed and alienation.
The mercurial Benji is the stone in your shoe, but he can also be charming, attentive and caring, but the mood swings and his biting, painful observations keep everyone on tenterhooks. When his light shines on you, you can feel like the most precious person in the world but when that light goes off …
Led by James, a non-Jewish, English academic played by Will Sharpe (who you might know from season two of the The White Lotus), the small tour group is challenged by Benji’s lack of a social filter but what are they there for if not to be challenged?
Benji complains to James that there are too many facts and figures on the tour, that the real people whose graves they visit are not just stories or examples for a thesis. In some ways, he is also crying out for everyone to see him as a real person, too.
It's as if he’s made of 100% scar tissue instead of flesh and blood, and that makes him difficult to navigate.
But David is equally unknowable, even to himself. That lack of introspection is also a defence mechanism.
A Real Pain has moments that will be painfully recognisable to anyone who has loved a difficult person but it’s also specific to Jewish experience. By the time the tour gets to the Maijdanek extermination camp, a facility built so close to the centre of Lublin that the smokestacks could be seen from the town square, the weight of the trauma experienced by Polish Jews is undeniable.
That trauma – in the form of survivor guilt, loss of faith and disconnection from community – is bubbling away under the surface for both of these two cousins. An inescapable fact, encoded into their DNA.
A Real Pain is written and directed by its co-star Jesse Eisenberg who is probably best known for playing Mark Zuckerberg in the Facebook story, The Social Network, but who has also generated a reputation as a writer for off-Broadway plays, New Yorker stories and his debut feature film, When You Finish Saving the World in 2022.
He’s written something that is very funny and at the same time deeply moving and his own performance has a lot to do with that. He’s the straight man to the force-of-nature that is Kieran Culkin as Benji and the fireworks of that performance are nothing without them being reflected in the eyes of a loving but disoriented cousin.
Culkin displays the verbal dexterity that we came to know in four seasons of Succession, but he goes to even greater depths here. I would say that it’s a star-making performance except that Culkin’s relationship to the acting profession is such that stardom is probably the least desirable outcome imaginable. He almost dropped out of this film two weeks before shooting started because he didn’t want to be away from his young family, but I have to say that their sacrifice is very much our gain.
Editor’s note
The New Zealand International Film Festival gets under way in Auckland in Thursday and I had hoped to have a preview of some of the titles before it starts but the new job and this three-week stint on At the Movies has interrupted that process. I’m hoping to have something for you here on Tuesday of next week, still in plenty of time for the other legs of the of the festival.
Where to watch A Real Pain
Aotearoa, Australia, Ireland & UK : Streaming on Disney+
Canada: Streaming on Disney+ or Crave
India: Not currently available online
USA: Streaming on Hulu