But isn’t everyone in pain somehow. I mean, look at what happened to our families. Look at where we came from. I mean, who isn’t… you know, who isn’t wrought?
David Kaplan
Jesse Eisenberg’s first feature 2020’s When You Finish Saving the World showed that he had potential to make 'something great' despite the film itself being uneven. The twitchy comedy plus tragedy ethos which he’d often adapted as a performer was transferred into his writing and direction and given to Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as mother and son to deliver. A Real Pain is Eisenberg’s something great and is a showcase for Kieran Culkin to throw all his chaotic charm and woundedness. It might seem like a vanity project for Eisenberg to cast himself as the ostensible lead, but it is nigh on impossible to imagine another actor in the role.
Estranged Jewish American cousins Benji (Culkin) and David (Eisenberg) Kaplan decide to honour their recently deceased grandmother Dora by visiting Poland to see her home before she was taken to a concentration camp. David is living in New York City and settled with his wife and son. He has anxiety and OCD which he controls via medication, yet it has become a fixture of his presenting personality. David is wound tight. Benji, his freewheeling but chronically depressed cousin lives somewhere upstate in his mother’s house. He’s unemployed, he seems to have no firm plans for the future; and vacillates between chill, charming, clear sighted, and being a massive pain in the ass of almost everyone he meets.
At a key point in the film, David will say of Benji, “I love him, and I hate him, and I want to kill him, and I want to be him.” Culkin’s extraordinary performance as the moody, exasperating, and profoundly wise firecracker makes the audience understand precisely what he means. David’s reserve, caution, and politeness have left him consistently playing second fiddle to Benji on the tour in Poland, but one suspects that it was somewhat always that way between them. Benji’s everything is just bigger and louder than David’s. When he focuses his attention on someone it is all consuming in both positive and negative aspects.
The Heritage Tour consists of a Midwestern couple Diane and Mark Binder (Liza Savoy and David Orestes) who term themselves ‘Mayflower Jews’. A recent divorcee Marsha Kramer (Jennifer Grey) who is feeling displaced in life. Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwanda massacre refugee who converted to Judaism in Winnipeg. Helmed by James (Will Sharpe) a polite gentile British Oxford scholar, the group almost immediately takes to Benji who dives in asking personal questions and giving, “Right on!” affirmations to everyone, especially Eloge.
When it comes to who the Kaplan cousins are – they were born three weeks apart and grew up as close as brothers. Every other aspect of their relationship and complex resentment (and love) for each other plays out through Eisenberg’s funny, mature, and at times thorny screenplay and how others see and interact with Benji and David.
The private interactions between David and Benji are brought alive through the palpable onscreen rapport between Eisenberg and Culkin. Benji will ask to borrow something from David and then offers it back as if it was his all along. It’s not done with malice but with a casual entitlement. To counter his casual steamrolling of David, he delivers wholly sincere compliments to his cousin with equal ease. David doesn’t want to see the sense of desperation pervading Benji’s behaviours, only his all too offhand attitude to life and his permanent immaturity.
The tour progresses and Benji’s rumpled charisma is difficult for the group to resist. He’s earnest and interested. He ignores social etiquette if it means he can somehow ‘help’ someone. Although David warns him not to interfere in people’s lives, Benji charges in and befriends Marsha who very much needs to talk to someone. He suggests wild and almost irreverent activities, but also freaks out when the group finds themselves on a train in first class. “Does anyone else feel like we are Royalty right now. Staying in fancy hotels and eating posh food. While remembering the suffering of the past. We can cut ourselves off from someone else’s true pain. People can’t walk around the world being happy all the time.”
In Lublin, what was once known as the “Jewish Oxford” Benji’s mood again darkens after a brief burst of energy and exhilaration where he ‘forced’ David to break the rules after not waking him at the correct station to continue with the tour. The once crucial seat of Jewish scholarship is now a bizarre palimpsest of new buildings, pre- and post-war architecture, and the scant remains of the Jewish presence there from the 16th Century. The oldest surviving synagogue is on the second floor of an office block.
The group travel to a cemetery and Benji berates James for spouting factoids avoiding connecting with the vast beauty, sacredness, and insurmountable destruction.
Benji’s mercurial mood swings come to a head at a dinner after the Lublin visit when David begins to push back at him. David says something he knows will cut Benji deeply. He quotes his Grandmother Dora about generational immigrants using the last line to single out how little Benji has achieved. The dinner scene is pivotal for David revealing his own pain, and how afraid he is for Benji. When Mark and Diane point out their different opinions on Benji, and Mark says that David seems okay he responds, “I’m not though. I’m not. I just take a pill for my fucking OCD… and I like move forward because I know that my pain is unexceptional, so I don’t feel the need to like, burden everybody with it, you know?... I am just so fucking exhausted by him sometimes. And I feel, like, so stupid around him because he is so fucking cool, and he just does not give a shit. And then… just like being here with him is just so fucking baffling to me, you know? It’s baffling. Because it’s like how did this guy come from the survivors of this place, you know?”
Breathing in the horror of the Holocaust at Majdanek concentration camp is where David reaches out to Benji with shared emotion. A hand on Benji’s shoulder as he openly weeps. A realisation that Benji’s self-destructive tendencies are intertwined with his inability to distance himself from the world and people. He feels it all too much. Dora was the only person in Benji’s life who could keep him in check. Without her he’s been afloat, and without David who was once his accomplice in mischief, he became rudderless. For Benji there is no loving wife and beautiful, curious son waiting at home for him in New York.
The balance between chaotic comedy driven by Culkin and straight man reserve driven by Eisenberg is breathtaking. The cousins do love each other and ultimately need the other to be okay. Whether Benji will be okay is a question mark, but he at least knows he has his Davey back. Not the Davey who will always go out drinking with him all night, but the Davey who will laugh at himself and laugh with Benji. A Davey who is partially unwound by the time he spends with Benji. Equally, Benji is touched that David cares enough about him to tell him he’s “lighting up rooms and then taking a dump in them.”
Eisenberg’s mastery of tone and timing shows itself in myriad ways. The thoughtful Eloge suggesting that David would benefit from Sabbat in a good-natured recognition of David’s anxiety. Benji and David’s “same but different” levels of understanding of the world and their selves; “the product of a thousand fucking miracles.”
A Real Pain is a work of immense humanity – honest, hilarious, hopeless, hopeful, and healing.
Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Cast: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Jennifer Grey
Writer: Jesse Eisenberg
Producers: Jesse Eisenberg, Ali Herting, Dave McCary, Ewa Puszczyńska, Jennifer Semler, Emma Stone
Cinematography: Michał Dymek
Editor: Robert Nassau
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