A movie with a title like “A Real Pain” is bound to be a tear-jerker at some point during the two hours you sit with it, but Jesse Eisenberg’s new film hits all the right notes to start the waterworks.
The story, which is semi-autobiographical for director, writer, producer and star Eisenberg, follows two cousins, David and Benji, as they travel to Poland to honor their grandmother after her death. They join a Jewish heritage tour and visit several Holocaust remembrance sites as they bond with their eclectic group of fellow travelers.
David and Benji, played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, respectively, were inseparable as children, but now that David lives with his wife and child in New York City and Benji lives on his mother’s couch in Binghamton, they’ve understandably grown apart. The interactions between the nervous, straight-laced David and the outspoken, feeling Benji are as natural, and have as much tension, as those between brothers.
The cousins share tender moments and memories of their grandmother, they bicker, they smoke weed on the rooftops of Polish hotels and they grieve the loss of their grandmother together. The film, like the cousins, effortlessly oscillates between humor and seriousness.
In one particularly poignant moment, Benji tells David that sometimes when he looks at David’s face, he sees their grandmother. “I look like an old Jewish woman?” David shoots back. They chuckle. Benji then corrects him and tells him he looks wise. “It’s beautiful,” he says.
This simple interaction, and the several others the cousins share when they talk about their grandmother or about Benji’s mental health struggles since her death, feels fresh. It’s easy and free, but it’s vulnerable. It doesn’t feel like some belabored conversation where the characters are forced to sit down and talk about their feelings. It’s just two people showing care and love for each other, beautifully written and directed by Eisenberg, and skillfully performed by him and Culkin.
The film, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Saturday, played to packed theaters of people who laughed and cried along with the characters at its heart. During an audience Q&A following a Sunday morning screening, Eisenberg said he’s surprised how many people have told him they appreciated the nuanced portrayal of men experiencing pain and being vulnerable.
“People are surprised, ‘Oh, the guys talk about their feelings,” he said. “To me, I can’t imagine anything else to talk about. But it turns out, I guess, I’m in the minority. If somebody will allow me to cry in public I’ll do it – to me, that seems the norm.”
Beyond the moving chemistry between Eisenberg and Culkin’s characters, the ensemble cast also portray the pain of remembering ancestors who survived or were killed in the Holocaust. Led by Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe, the cast that rounds out the Polish tour compliments the vulnerability of Eisenberg and Culkin with their own musings on how the suffering throughout Jewish history impacts them today.
Even with the impressive performances across the board, the film is a star vehicle for Culkin. The actor, who recently won a slew of awards for his work on “Succession,” shows a level of depth and nuance in this performance that even fans of the HBO show, who saw Roman Roy’s relentless snark and deep insecurity, were not necessarily privy to before.
“He’s a genius,” Eisenberg said of his co-star. “I can’t say enough good things about an actor who also wouldn’t rehearse, who showed up the day before, late to rehearsal, told me he didn’t know his lines, and then the camera turns on and this guy is like the most magical creature I’ve ever worked with and it’s just this astounding thing.”
“Astounding” is an appropriate word to describe Culkin’s presence on the screen. His haunting expression and eventual breakdown during the group’s visit to the former site of the Majdanek concentration camp is so stirring, it almost makes you sick to your stomach.
Still, even when exploring such weighty themes as what Eisenberg calls the “generational trauma” that came out of the Holocaust, it maintains levity throughout, which is due, in great part, to Culkin’s sharp comedic timing.
“My entire goal was to try to make a movie that can speak to these weighty themes without being pretentious and without being kind of inaccessible or feel impenetrable or like homework,” he said. “The challenge, really, is to be able to tell a story that is funny and is about those themes without compromising the reverence that those themes deserve.”
It was evident through Eisenberg’s words following the screening, and in his humility following the standing ovation he received, that this film was, as he called it, “a labor of love,” and a love letter to his Polish heritage. The gorgeous shots of Polish museums and landscapes, many of which are scored by musing Chopin Nocturnes, are enough to make the film beautiful, but the themes and impressive emotional gymnastics it accomplishes make it an instant standout at Sundance.
Less than a full day after its premiere at the festival, Searchlight Pictures acquired the worldwide rights to “A Real Pain” for $10 million in the first major deal to come out of Sundance. It is not yet known when the film will be released.