Jesse Eisenberg has an odd sense of humor. His latest film, his second as writer and director, is called A Real Pain, and the title doubles as serious statement and casual joke. Eisenberg plays a gentle introvert named David Kaplan, living in New York City with his wife and young son. He and his unmarried cousin and childhood friend Benjy Kaplan, played by Kieran Culkin, are going on a trip to Poland. Their grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, died recently, and left them money to visit Poland to see the house she grew up in, and learn more about their Jewish heritage. David has booked a Holocaust tour to that end.
Benjy is a real pain, which is the casual joke I mentioned from the title. He’s constantly sarcastic and provocative. Every other sentence has the “f” word. He has a kind of renegade charm that dominates and intimidates David, and can also ingratiate him with strangers and casual acquaintances—people tend to like him despite his motor-mouth eccentricity. Culkin’s nervous delivery and offbeat mannerisms reminded me somewhat of his Emmy award-winning character Roman in the HBO series Succession. But his character Benjy in this film is altogether more believable as a lonely, fallible human being. In the midst of the group on the Holocaust tour, he is always taking center stage and steering the conversation his way, the way of trivial personal commentary. At the statue commemorating the Warsaw uprising, which shows a group of heroes engaging in armed resistance to the Nazis, he jumps up on it and starts play acting as one of the figures, eventually getting everyone except David to join him. It’s easy to underrate Eisenberg’s performance as David. His reactions to his cousin’s behavior range from puzzled to angry to embarrassed, but his passive outsider role is funny in its own quiet way.
The humor in this film is based on an unusual dichotomy. There is a contrast between the awe and wonder we may feel while visiting historical monuments and sites on the one hand, and our own private personal problems that we carry around with us wherever we go. This also hints at the difference between our experience as existing individuals, and our awareness of the great abstractions of world history. In this case, however, Eisenberg has added the element of the Holocaust, which is not funny, and thus accentuates the contrast with the everyday foolishness of human beings, typified here by cousin Benjy—thoughtless, selfish, and immature.
Eisenberg doesn’t go overboard with this premise. Rest assured, there’s no laughter when they visit a concentration camp. The humor is just a tool to, in effect, pry open our view of self-centered life—and not just of Benjy, but of people in general. The movie turns wistful eventually, as we contemplate the way people navigate the real pain of history’s victims.
Eisenberg makes the smaller details telling, like a brief interaction with a neighbor at the grandmother’s old house that reveals more as we think about it. Culkin is exquisitely annoying and troubled in his role, and we are allowed to finally glimpse the pain under the mask. We are left with the sadness of knowing that there are many people who never grow up. A Real Pain reveals Eisenberg’s unusual insight in basing a comedy drama on this sad knowledge.
