Benji’s advice is much appreciated in ‘A Real Pain’
... so what’s the problem?
A few months after the theatrical release of “A Real Pain,” a nonprofit founder named Luke Berryman wrote a newspaper op-ed observing that “Holocaust education in the United States is unbelievably poor.” But Berryman writes, “Holocaust entertainment, on the other hand, is booming. Recent Holocaust movies have won multiple Academy Awards and Golden Globes. ‘Holocaust tourism’ — visiting memorials and former extermination sites — is now a billion-dollar industry.”
“A Real Pain,” for better or worse, checks a lot of those boxes.
“Entertainment” is an important word here. A year ago, the Oscars voted “The Zone of Interest” best international film. Most people would probably not say they were “entertained” by that film even if they found it powerful. But “A Real Pain” is explained on its Wikipedia page as a “comedy-drama,” and calling it “entertaining” is not a slight, but a compliment.
To the op-ed writer’s point, “A Real Pain” is not attempting “Holocaust education,” other than maybe on the distant periphery. It is almost a self-parody, a movie whose characters lament how they can’t possibly grieve enough for what happened at these sites they’re seeing and thus feel worse about that shortcoming than the atrocities they’re marking. The funny thing about Kieran Culkin’s Benji — the more David complains about him, the more beneficial others seem to be finding Benji’s commentary.
“A Real Pain” is a fairly typical movie plot about a loved person whose weaknesses frustrate and confound those who love him. A person who is impressive enough to easily get ahead in life if he’d just get his act together and stop cutting corners everywhere. The drama is over how much to intervene, how close to get to this person. What creator/director/actor Jesse Eisenberg has got is not “Holocaust drama” but a universal family-frustration concept that counts the Laura Linney-Mark Ruffalo “You Can Count on Me” under its umbrella.
These characters, unlike, say, those in “Rain Man” or “Leaving Las Vegas,” are sorting out their situation under an ethnic reality of knowing that no matter what their problems may be, immediate relatives had it much worse, which makes the two principals feel even worse about their struggles for fulfillment in the 2020s.
One of the major challenges for the characters in “A Real Pain” is that there are so many movies about this subject, however tangential, that it’s hard to make a cinematic statement that hasn’t been made before — perhaps even the same day in an adjoining theater. As “A Real Pain” was playing to strong reviews, moviegoers in late 2024/early 2025 could also see “September 5” or “The Brutalist” or even “Bonhoefer” or “One Life,” the latter two about guys who really did do something to stop it ... and even they feel inadequate.
That’s probably why “A Real Pain” avoids the most common themes of Holocaust-affected films, the most prominent message being This Can’t Be Allowed To Happen Again; or those who quietly risked their lives to help, or the heroes who spoke up. It will deal somewhat with the meaning of “survivor” but is at heart a road-trip buddy movie involving characters who just happen to be Jewish. A writer for Forward complains that though the movie is “interested in pain,” it doesn’t have “much insight into Jewish pain,” and the writer suggests it implies “that the Holocaust is a generic pain.”
According to online reporting and Eisenberg interviews, Culkin apparently is not Jewish. It would be anyone’s guess as to whether that would increase or decrease appreciation of his performance, except that he has already won a Golden Globe for it.
The problem for “A Real Pain” is that once its surprisingly able support cast disappears, so does the movie. After a choppy start in which characters supply all the details in conversation, it jumps the shark fairly early, when Benji somehow convinces the other tourgoers to pose among the statues marking the Warsaw Uprising, almost like how Randall McMurphy took the gang on a joyride in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” But from that point, the interactions between Benji and David and their quirky tour companions begin to catch fire. The rest of the group take David’s protestations at face value, that he’s not “in on” the shenanigans of his cousin and is sincerely troubled by Benji’s behavior on this trip. They begin to all act like cousins, critiquing each other, putting up with each other, sharing stories with each other, trusting (at least a little bit) each other.
The initial meeting of the complete tour group, at a hotel, is sort of like a self-help meeting, with the standard cliche of a bunch of people seriously explaining why they are here while one wiseacre disrupts the proceedings with insenstive comments. What access/accommodations is the group getting from this tour that they couldn’t achieve on their own? Eisenberg says in an interview that he and his wife visited Poland in 2008 and “we did the trip shown in the movie but not on a tour.” The movie group checks just about all the demographic boxes (except for little kids), which is good, because while they visit these sites, there is somehow no one else in this movie doing the same (try getting Dealey Plaza all to yourself), and it’s up to the group members to supply some difficult backstories. Like in many movies, it will take a mind-altering substance (marijuana in this instance) to get one or more uptight characters (who haven’t brought their own stuff) to loosen up.
“Rain Man” is wrongly regarded as a Dustin Hoffman movie when it’s a Tom Cruise movie. In “A Real Pain,” the awards crowd may be getting it right. San Francisco critic Mick LaSalle notes that Benji is “the focus of the entire movie,” but he wouldn’t win a Best Actor award and thus is entered in Supporting Actor categories, which he “probably” will win. Yet LaSalle correctly makes the argument that “the protagonist is the person who changes,” so it’s fair to call Eisenberg the “star” of the film. David’s only real growth, though, is relief that he’s not Benji.
“Shoah” is the extraordinary 1985 documentary by Claude Lanzmann that asked survivors — and onlookers — to recall what happened to European Jews four decades earlier. The candid thoughts of non-Jews in the 1980s convinced Pauline Kael that “Shoah” demonstrates that “the past and the present are one — that this horror could happen again.”
“A Real Pain,” outwardly, doesn’t feel that way. There is a hint, involving rocks on a doorstep, of Polish indifference. But never does the film try to tell us what the locals think of these sites. The movie geographically is a joint production with Poland and unlike “Shoah” avoids, as Benji complains, almost any contact with the custodians of this territory. Portraying what others may think of these events is beyond the scope of this movie. It’s about how to convince a difficult person that life could be a lot worse.
It is not Eisenberg’s David who makes the statements in his film, it is David’s late/unseen grandmother, who clearly believes that “Holocaust tourism” will be beneficial for her grandsons, a sentiment not expressed in “Shoah.” What kind of statement is this grandmother making? She may be informing David that such a trip can “save” Benji. Or perhaps she feels her grandsons do not appreciate their Jewish identity enough. Or she may have had trouble communicating about her experiences in life and thought a tour could do it for her on some level.
In a lot of road-trip movies (including John Cassevetes’ “Husbands”), the trip involves someone having difficulty with a woman, wondering whether it’s worth it, and in the process becoming a better man. Benji has no such concerns. Neither does David, who has a wonderful wife and child waiting for him back home. David’s only baggage is his not-really-dubious job, even though Benji and most of the computergoing public find his product obnoxious. But that’s the difference between David and Benji — conformity may be a necessary evil.
Sometimes our acquaintances bring out the best in us. For Benji, that’s not really the case. In David, and the other members of the tour, he has an audience for his grievances, and he can’t help but let ’em hear it. In the latter half of this film, David will portray this endeavor as a life-saving mission. He struggles with Benji’s problems far more than Benji does. You can only do so much. At some point, others have to figure it out for themselves.
3 stars
(February 2025)
“A Real Pain” (2024)
Starring
Kieran Culkin as Benji Kaplan ♦
Jesse Eisenberg as David Kaplan ♦
Olha Bosova as Flight Attendant ♦
Banner Eisenberg as Abe ♦
Jakub Gąsowski as Receptionist ♦
Will Sharpe as James ♦
Daniel Oreskes as Mark ♦
Liza Sadovy as Diane ♦
Kurt Egyiawan as Eloge ♦
Jennifer Grey as Marcia ♦
Ellora Torchia as Priya ♦
Piotr Czarniecki as Conductor ♦
Krzysztof Jaszczak as Pianist ♦
Marek Kasprzyk as Older Man ♦
Jakub Pruski as Son
Directed by: Jesse Eisenberg
Written by: Jesse Eisenberg
Producer: Jesse Eisenberg
Producer: Ali Herting
Producer: Dave McCary
Producer: Ewa Puszczyńska
Producer: Jennifer Semler
Producer: Emma Stone
Associate producer: Remy Love
Line producer: Becky Glupczynski
Line producer: Poland: Magdalena Malisz
Executive producer: Michael Bloom
Executive producer: Ryan Heller
Executive producer: Kevin Kelly
Executive producer: Jennifer Westin
Co-executive producer: Jasmine Daghighian
Cinematography: Michał Dymek
Editing: Robert Nassau
Casting: Jessica Kelly
Production design: Mela Melak
Costumes: Malgorzata Fudala
Makeup and hair: Magdalena Brojak, Honorata Godlewska, Olga Nejbauer, Przemyslaw Zaremba
Post-production supervisor: Jennifer DiLullo
