A Real Pain Review: Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin Take an Unforgettable Trip

This is turning out to be  a wonderful year for vibrant, audaciously stylish movies — from Challengers to Emilia Pérez to Anora, with Nickel Boys and Babygirl still to come.

By contrast, A Real Pain, written and directed by and starring Jesse Eisenberg, is made with considerable visual economy and an understated script that  doesn’t indulge in fancy-pants narrative tricks. (It’s not much flashier than Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2.) But few other films this year have delivered a similar emotional punch, or displayed such moral power and intelligence. And it's a comedy!

Sometimes a modest film can trip you up like a tree root thrusting up through the sidewalk. 

The movie begins as a kind of road-trip buddy movie, although from the start the humor has a reserved dryness — Eisenberg doesn’t seem like someone who would ever use "LOL" without a fine edge of contempt.

He plays David, a digital ad salesman, reuniting with his slacker cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) on a Polish Holocaust tour with four other travelers (one of them, a recent divorcee, is played by Jennifer Grey).

Their British guide (Will Sharpe), who apologizes for being the only member of the party who isn't Jewish, informs them at the start that "this will be a tour about pain." He says "pain" in an earnest but oddly hollow way that makes it clear he doesn't understand how the word registers with these people traveling into a world that, to them, is death. He's acutely sensitive, in his way, but he could be a hotel concierge explaining how the blinds work.

As the group visits landmarks in Warsaw and then moves on to Lubin, Benji is fun, outgoing and often overbearing — he refuses to stay in a first-class train seat, arguing that this insults the Jews who were treated like cattle en route to the death camps. David is more reigned in, but also medicated to deal with years of anxiety. Benji spills his gut; David is tightly, uncomfortably trussed.

Eisenberg's script delineates these high-contrast cousins with such deceptive ease, you might initially feel he’s venturing across territory you already know. 

In its first third or so, the film feels as if it might wind up like Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a coolly observed philosophical comedy that suggests that two friends, one adventuresome (Scarlett Johansson) and the other cautious (Rebecca Hall), will pursue their individual paths — obey their natures — all the way to the grave. David and Benji's interactions also suggest the heartbreakingly unstable brother-sister relationship between Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo in You Can Count on Me. 

But eventually you realize that Eisenberg is quietly pushing beyond those two films (both of which happen to be classics, so that tells you something).

Benji is psychologically unmoored in a way that the film and Culkin (who’s excellent) make fully plausible: He has no job, veers from exultant happiness to cratering sadness and spends hours alone at the airport, studying other travelers. And he can be cruel: He admonishes the tour guide to stop piling on details of Jewish history with a strained niceness so cutting and false it all but demolishes the poor man.

But why is Benji this way? You never really know, even while you cry for him. David, on the other hand, is more understandable — life, to him, is a battle, and to close down emotionally is a form of self-preservation. Actually, you cry for him too.

And then there’s that other thing: The looming horror of the Holocaust, which is discussed among the tourists with a matter-of-fact openness that Benji — who’s come to Poland with David in honor of their late grandmother, a tough old woman who apparently escaped the Nazis by the skin of her teeth — simply can’t grasp. He's the only one who collapses in sobs after the group visits the death camp at Majdanek.

Eisenberg, to his credit, films these scenes with a mute lack of drama, letting the ovens and piles of discarded shoes express their horror without any dramatic shadowing or darkening.

From these two threads — the cousins’ disparate lives and their third-generation attempt to honor the Jews destroyed in World War II — Eisenberg has woven a much larger, richer story. It draws on more themes than I probably can, or should, count. You should just see the movie and experience it.

Two last things:

1.) The score features, almost exclusively, the music of Chopin, Poland’s great composer. The effect is elegiac and tenderly melancholic, like sadness instead of electricity humming along a wire.

2.) When all is said and done, A Real Pain says more about the Holocaust than The Zone of Interest.

And it's a comedy!

A Real Pain is in select theaters now, then everywhere Nov. 15.