
We only feel like outsiders in relation to the aggressions and struggles that someone different experiences. This should not be seen as a critique on what compassion or empathy offers to a person. If anything, we now see them as absolutely needed. However, the would be fallacy of it all is to over identify with them or for someone to focus too much on empathy. Witnessing allyhood, and being able to cry with someone, all connecting and nurturing the human things within us all while individuals speak different emotions based on their prior time. This is a truth all too familiar and relatable to Jesse Eisenberg’s moving A Real Pain in this case two cousins who go off to a land where many would only assume pain exists battling their own personal demons when in fact they have not fought one battle. Arguably, it is the inverse story of two siblings who have been brought up in different distinct ways one is a cultologist, the other a researcher. And as with brothers, there’s always a clamoring to be like one another. This film depicts most extremely the frustration that depicts the beloved roles of both shaft men.
Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Eisenberg) are on a fact finding trip to Poland with hopes of visiting their wife’s grandmother’s hometown and uncovering the Holocaust effects in the region. Benji’s cold hard reality is that of a ‘BFF’ whose loving grandmother just died and who now has to deal with those lonely chapters all living beings experience at some point. As the incredibly younger siblings in this case who happen to be cousins, they join this tour led by the captivating James (Will Sharpe) who is accompanied by other four tourists Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egiywan, Liza Sadovy, and Daniel Oreskes. Every one of them gets the feeling they will return to their lives after finishing the tour they never had such lives in Poland. One of the countless terrific aspects of Eisenberg’s superb script is that there are no emotional pawns in the conflict the other tourists. This film could easily have been a much worse version where each member of the tour had some problems for either Benji or David to solve. However, they are not albeit only background they add to the overall realism of the piece.
Most of them won’t notice because they’ll be so captivated but what the Emmy winning Culkin does to this movie. He appeared in easily one of the best performances of the 2024 year, portraying the kind of person we all know (or were at some point in our lives) a friend or a relative that we often hate but somehow even at his worst secretly wish to be like. So bare, so real, Culkin defines Benji in a manner so spontaneous that it doesn’t seem pre planned even for a second. He completely disappears into this character so quickly in spite of seeing him for hours on Succession, and we trust all of his decisions made for this character. He cracks the puzzle of how to display a subtext that many characters do not speak, but which escapes Benji’s eyes, shoulders, and voice.
What makes the film believable and realistic, what elevates the complexity of the emotion in the film A Real Pain, is the way Eisenberg the writer/director treats Benji as a character in the film. He isn’t particularly favorable of the character but neither is he forgiving. He’s a pain in the ass. However, he is justified when he is appalled at having to take a train to a concentration camp or when he bursts in anger at James for spitting out statistics like it’s a game instead of making an effort to actually meet people in the towns they go to. This moment has great scene after great scene turning to a particular scene that focuses on Benji’s reality in an emotionally complex world. No one before had ever dissed a nice and knowledgeable person called James so it was easy to paint Benji as a bad person when how right he was. It’s him expressing his feelings honestly without a filter. What’s wrong with that? Why do so many of us shy away from saying how we really feel because we fear others may not agree with us? Isn’t that really what causes suffering in the first place?
Kieran Culkin’s performance may steal the show in applauds for this particular film but in saying that, everything that Eisenberg has done as a writer and director should never go unappreciated.
He incorporates music subtly and a good example of this is when he takes his score off the mix as the tour is at a concentration camp, a place where music is not needed since there is so much to say without sound. He also makes good use of the film’s plot which he manages to condense into 90 minutes of footage which is lean yet entirely satisfying. He films Poland with admiration, never allowing the American travelogue approach that often spoils such a movie. Each time that A Real Pain is about to turn kitschy or sentimentalistic Eisenberg’s choices defuse it.
And that whenever, wherever this organic connection does not fail to deliver the unexpected. At the end of it all, it is about two individuals or two lovers as time has come to see them who have tortured themselves with being apart and not even knowing why. And yet there is love. It’s exuded in every shot. David loves his wife and his child whom he left home but feels that Benji will eventually be lonely in spite of being the first one to walk into any new place and make new friends and genuinely care about other people’s lives. Within the span of the film, which is just 90 minutes long, we see David and Benji as our own siblings or cousins. And even when it is highly impossible to be able to share first hand experiences of their feelings, traces of us are made visible to them. To see a piece of art as life is so sobering in particular when it drives home the truth that pain is an equally significant aspect of life as anything else is.
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