Jesse Eisenberg (2024)

Most English-language pictures of the last year have been so ropy there’s a risk of overrating one that bucks the trend.  But A Real Pain – well written, directed and acted (and, at ninety minutes, on the short side) – is a good film.  Thinking about the Holocaust victims and survivors among his own Ashkenazi ancestors led Jesse Eisenberg to devise this story of two present-day Jewish Americans – David Kaplan (Eisenberg) and his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) – on an organised ‘Holocaust tour’ of Poland.  They’re the same age; as kids, they were ‘joined at the hip’.  As adults, they’ve gone their separate ways.  Their short trip to Poland – to honour the memory of their late, much-loved grandmother – is in effect a reunion.

The cousins are conceived as chalk and cheese.  David, married with a young son, lives and works, selling digital ads, in New York City.  Jobless Benji lives alone in upstate Binghamton:  his main occupation seems to be getting hold of and smoking weed.  En route to JFK, tense, schedule-driven David leaves half a dozen voicemails on Benji’s phone detailing his rate of progress to the airport.  When he arrives, he’s amazed to learn that Benji has already been at JFK a couple of hours though their flight’s not due to leave for a couple of hours more.  Different as they are, he and David have similar speech patterns:  both talk fast, as if in competition.  It takes a while to adjust to this and you may find the rat-a-tat delivery getting on your nerves, Benji’s especially.  This isn’t unintentional on Jesse Eisenberg’s part:  Benji also gets on David’s nerves; once they’re in Poland, his motormouth candour tries the patience of others in the small tour party.  Yet Benji engages his travelling companions – and us – too.  Eisenberg’s script neatly justifies the pair getting back together:  their grandmother, who died recently, left money in her will for them to make the Polish trip.  David and Benji have arranged in advance to leave the rest of the party before the tour’s end to spend an extra night in Lublin and, next day, visit the house there that was once Grandma Dory’s home.  This is neat too, as a means of ensuring they’re left to themselves at the business end of the story.

There are seven tourists all told, five of them ethnically Jewish.  The other three Jews are all Americans a generation older than fortyish David and Benji – Marsha (Jennifer Grey), a recently divorced ‘lady who lunches’, and retired married couple Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Paul (Daniel Oreskes).  The party is completed by English tour guide James (Will Sharpe), an Oxford graduate in East European studies, and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who came to the US as a child refugee and subsequently converted to Judaism.  All five contribute a good deal to A Real Pain.  The exchanges involving them, like those between David and Benji, include a mixture of funny, poignant and awkward moments.  Eisenberg orchestrates these well-cast actors beautifully:  their playing is at just the right level and Will Sharpe is especially good.  When James first speaks, his unprepossessing looks and Yorkshire accent seem to promise a cartoon anorak; as the story goes on, James becomes much more.  After Benji has a go at the tour guide – ‘like, the constant barrage of stats is kinda making this trip a little cold … we’ve just been going from one touristy thing to another, not meeting anyone who’s actually Polish!’ – James is winded.  He’s as genial as ever but even less comfortable than before, always seeming to check what he’s saying it as he says it.

Not everyone is always so anxious to accommodate Benji’s outbursts.  On the railway journey to Lublin, he rails against the ‘irony’ that the party is ‘eating this fancy food – sitting up here when eighty years ago we would have been herded into the backs of these things like fuckin’ cattle’.  He gets up and heads for the rear of the train:  ‘I don’t think you’ll find much suffering back there either,’ observes Mark.  For the most part, though, A Real Pain gets a lot of mileage from the rest of the group preferring to keep things polite, however infuriating Benji is.  Eisenberg pushes this rather too far when, on the same train journey, the Kaplans miss their stop and take a fare-dodging ride (which terrifies David) back in the direction whence they came, to find the tour group waiting uncomplainingly for them at Lublin station.  Benji reveals himself as nostalgic for childhood, when David, ‘anxious and adorable’, was always crying.  Now, Benji complains, he never shows any emotion at all.  David, who sees this as part of being the grown-up that his cousin clearly isn’t, is increasingly embarrassed by loose-cannon Benji.  He seems always to be apologising for him.

Jesse Eisenberg originally intended to play Benji, which is undoubtedly the film’s star turn.  Benji has as much screen time as David and the actor playing Benji a lot more opportunities to make a big impression.  While he and Benji tell each other things in the hotel rooms they share throughout, David, in the company of the rest of the party, opens up just once – and suddenly, during dinner at a Lublin restaurant.  Benji, in another fury, has gone to the bathroom.  While he’s away from the table, David tells the others how he feels about himself and about his cousin, and reveals that, six months ago, Benji attempted suicide.  The speech may seem a bit much but Eisenberg cannily disarms criticism with David’s closing line – ‘Sorry, I’m oversharing’.  The next second, Benji is back in the limelight.  He wasn’t the only one exasperated by the restaurant pianist’s cheesy choice of ‘Hava Nagila’ to serenade diners.  Now Benji has somehow taken over the piano, playing ‘Tea for Two’.  These are the only musical interruptions to the Chopin pieces that Eisenberg uses throughout A Real Pain.  Chopin is a good choice – Polish, obviously, and the music is affecting, although it isn’t there to cue particular emotional effects.  There’s no music on the soundtrack when the tourists visit the Majdanek camp.  This doesn’t come over as falsely reverential:  Eisenberg has used the Chopin sparingly enough to avoid that impression.

Kieran Culkin certainly makes the most of the generous gift he’s given.  Benji has the lion’s share of the best one-liners – such as his response, when Marsha laments that her daughter has married a rich man and no longer seems capable of intelligent conversation, that ‘Money’s like fuckin’ heroin for boring people’.  Benji finds other things boring, too – David’s line of work, for example – and his capacity for being bored has a lot to do with the deficits of his own life.  The more volatile and unreasonable he becomes, the more Culkin makes clear that, as his companions also realise, Benji is ‘in pain’.  He has a personal charm, though, that David envies.  When the pair take their leave of the others, James tells Benji, ‘I’ve been doing these tours for five years and you’re the first person to give me any actionable feedback’.  Benji doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about – he was probably off his head when he savaged James earlier – but embraces him.  David looks on; all he gets from James is a ‘bye, David’.  It’s no surprise that Kieran Culkin, rather than Jesse Eisenberg, is getting acting prizes in the current awards season but Eisenberg’s achievement in portraying David shouldn’t be underestimated.  He brings off something difficult:  he makes David charmless, without being in the least dislikable.

Eisenberg’s screenplay is attracting awards attention.  This is well-deserved not just because the script includes plenty of sharp, smart dialogue but also because it dares to be anti-climactic and unresolved.  Lublin cemetery contains what’s thought to be the oldest grave in Poland, that of Jacob Levi Kopleman – ‘a real Polish person – from Poland’, James nervously stresses before suggesting that the group follow Jewish tradition by placing stones on the tombstone to show ‘you are not forgotten’.  When the cousins visit Grandma Dory’s former house, David follows suit outside what was her front door.  A Polish man who lives nearby complains that the stones are a trip hazard.  David and Benji sheepishly remove them.  That’s the end of the scene and virtually the end of the trip.  Eisenberg gives the visit to Poland real meaning for David and Benji without this eclipsing the importance of their own relationship – but that, too, is unresolved.  There isn’t a detailed explanation of Benji’s unhappiness or a decisive emotional breakthrough at the end of their week together.  Even though, when they land, David invites Benji to come back home with him for dinner, the two part, as they met, at JFK airport.  David returns to his wife (Ellora Torchia) and son (Jesse Eisenberg’s own son, Banner).  Benji says he’ll hang around in the airport for a bit – ‘I kinda like it here.  You meet the craziest people’.  At the end of Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009), the George Clooney protagonist gazed, puzzled and desolate, at an airport departures board.  Like Up in the Air, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is very talkative but it too concludes with a wordless and wondrous close-up on a man’s face.  Benji sits on an airport bench, looking around him.  He’s smiling, as if among friends, yet the effect is terribly sad.  Kieran Culkin has a ball with his splendid lines in A Real Pain but his last, silent moment is the best moment of all.

15 January 2025