Heartbreaking and funny, 'A Real Pain' is one of the best movies of the year
With “A Real Pain,” Jesse Eisenberg — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — pulls off a kind of magic trick.
He’s made a movie with backdrops of pain and despair, both personal and existential, that is also funny, charming and something approaching uplifting. Ta-da!
But the real magic here is in Kieran Culkin’s remarkable performance.
The temptation is to compare Culkin’s character, Benji Kaplan, with Roman Roy, the would-be heir to a global fortune in “Succession.” Fair enough. They’re both unfiltered and at times obnoxious and kind of weird, but their lives and their motivations are vastly different. Roman is desperate for power. Benji just wants to get by.
Kieran Culkin's performance in 'A Real Pain' is great
We meet Benji in an airport, waiting for his cousin, David Kaplan (Eisenberg). The two, nothing alike, were once close, practically brothers, but have grown apart. Now they are embarking on a group Holocaust tour of Poland. They also plan to break away from the group at the end of the tour to visit the home where their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, grew up. She has recently died, a blow to both men, but especially Benji.
David is a bundle of nervous energy, terrified that Benji will be late for the flight, calling him repeatedly from his cab. Of course, Benji has been there a while — for hours, he says. We immediately see the difference in the two; as David fidgets his way through security, Benji makes friends with the TSA agents.
It goes pretty much the same way when they arrive and meet the rest of the tour group. Benji is loud, brash, says whatever he’s thinking. David is nervous and carefully polite. Guess who everyone warms up to? At a stop at a memorial to Polish soldiers Benji coerces the group into posing for goofy photos, everyone loosening up, getting into it.
David takes the pictures.
But Benji isn’t just a good-time tourist, not the ugly American who is so charming everyone likes him anyway. Eisenberg’s film is too smart for that. Benji’s moods change on a dime. He is consumed by guilt and panic while the group rides a train in first class seating to one of the stops — they are Jews on a train in Poland. Does no one else struggle with this?
He befriends Marcia (Jennifer Grey, quite good), but his emotions are fleeting. He berates the well-meaning host (Will Sharpe) for how rote his guidance is, void of personal interaction.
“I love him and I hate him and I want to kill him and I want to be him,” David says to the group of his cousin after a particularly uncomfortable moment.
Jesse Eisenberg's direction is perfect
Eisenberg’s direction is perfect — and a perfect match for Culkin’s performance. No feature film is a documentary, and shouldn’t be, but Benji feels real, or at least as real as a character in a movie can be. His face, his eyes, the falling-out-of-bed way he carries himself, all point toward the pain he has felt and feels in his life.
In a short, powerful scene in the Majdanek concentration camp Eisenberg pulls back entirely, allowing us to see it in silence as the characters do. It’s a moving moment in a film that has many of them.
If all this sounds like a downer, it’s not. “A Real Pain” isn’t just funny, it’s also inviting. You want to spend time with these characters, even when Benji is at his most off-putting. There is an openness to the characters, to the entire film. When it’s over — the final image is as genuine and haunting as anything you will see this year — you feel like you know these people. And you’re glad you do.
'A Real Pain' 5 stars
Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★
Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★
Director: Jesse Eisenberg.
Cast: Kieran Culkin, Jesse Eisenberg, Will Sharpe.
Rating: R for language throughout and some drug use.
How to watch: In theaters Friday, Nov. 15.
Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.