Something to watch tonight: Monday 28 July

A Real Pain (Eisenberg, 2024)

Mentioning Will Sharpe last week in my recom­mend­a­tion of Giri/Haji on Netflix, I thought I would check on the where­abouts of Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, which fea­tures Sharpe as the guide for the Holocaust tour that Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin’s char­ac­ters are on.

It’s slipped out quietly on Disney+ so if you have a sub­scrip­tion there (you know, for the kids) you’ll find one of the most thought­ful films of the last 12 months.

I reviewed it dur­ing my stint on At the Summer Movies earli­er this year and, as that seg­ment didn’t get turned into a writ­ten page, I include the whole thing below. As always, it’s worth a listen, as the clips really add so much.

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg’s char­ac­ter David talks about how everyone’s life is already full of pain so why would you will­ingly go and seek out more of it?

The fact that he says that while he’s on a guided tour of Jewish his­tory in Poland, centred around the dev­ast­a­tion of the Holocaust, is iron­ic but, to be fair, he’s not there for him­self. He is on this road trip with his aim­less cous­in Benji (played by Kieran Culkin). As chil­dren they were insep­ar­able but as adults they have grown apart and Benji has been knocked for six by the death of their beloved grand­moth­er, Dory.

She was a Polish Holocaust sur­viv­or – she sur­vived because of a thou­sand mir­acles, David says – and this trip is a way for both cous­ins to hon­our her memory and hope­fully recon­nect with each other.

But the trip is also going to rip off the band aid on some deep intergen­er­a­tion­al trauma. Both of them have it but are fail­ing to deal with it in com­pletely dif­fer­ent ways. David, by throw­ing him­self into a tra­di­tion­al middle-class life of career and fam­ily, and Benji by simply drift­ing through life in a haze of weed and alienation.

The mer­cur­i­al Benji is the stone in your shoe, but he can also be charm­ing, attent­ive and caring, but the mood swings and his bit­ing, pain­ful obser­va­tions keep every­one on ten­ter­hooks. When his light shines on you, you can feel like the most pre­cious per­son in the world but when that light goes off …

Led by James, a non-Jewish, English aca­dem­ic played by Will Sharpe (who you might know from sea­son two of the The White Lotus), the small tour group is chal­lenged by Benji’s lack of a social fil­ter but what are they there for if not to be challenged?

Benji com­plains to James that there are too many facts and fig­ures on the tour, that the real people whose graves they vis­it are not just stor­ies or examples for a thes­is. In some ways, he is also cry­ing out for every­one to see him as a real per­son, too.

It’s as if he’s made of 100% scar tis­sue instead of flesh and blood, and that makes him dif­fi­cult to navigate.

But David is equally unknow­able, even to him­self. That lack of intro­spec­tion is also a defence mechanism.

A Real Pain has moments that will be pain­fully recog­nis­able to any­one who has loved a dif­fi­cult per­son but it’s also spe­cif­ic to Jewish exper­i­ence. By the time the tour gets to the Maijdanek exterm­in­a­tion camp, a facil­ity built so close to the centre of Lublin that the smokestacks could be seen from the town square, the weight of the trauma exper­i­enced by Polish Jews is undeniable.

That trauma – in the form of sur­viv­or guilt, loss of faith and dis­con­nec­tion from com­munity – is bub­bling away under the sur­face for both of these two cous­ins. An ines­cap­able fact, encoded into their DNA.

A Real Pain is writ­ten and dir­ec­ted by its co-star Jesse Eisenberg who is prob­ably best known for play­ing Mark Zuckerberg in the Facebook story, The Social Network, but who has also gen­er­ated a repu­ta­tion as a writer for off-Broadway plays, New Yorker stor­ies and his debut fea­ture film, When You Finish Saving the World in 2022.

He’s writ­ten some­thing that is very funny and at the same time deeply mov­ing and his own per­form­ance has a lot to do with that. He’s the straight man to the force-of-nature that is Kieran Culkin as Benji and the fire­works of that per­form­ance are noth­ing without them being reflec­ted in the eyes of a lov­ing but dis­or­i­ented cousin.

Culkin dis­plays the verbal dex­ter­ity that we came to know in four sea­sons of Succession, but he goes to even great­er depths here. I would say that it’s a star-making per­form­ance except that Culkin’s rela­tion­ship to the act­ing pro­fes­sion is such that star­dom is prob­ably the least desir­able out­come ima­gin­able. He almost dropped out of this film two weeks before shoot­ing star­ted because he didn’t want to be away from his young fam­ily, but I have to say that their sac­ri­fice is very much our gain.

Editor’s note

The New Zealand International Film Festival gets under way in Auckland in Thursday and I had hoped to have a pre­view of some of the titles before it starts but the new job and this three-week stint on At the Movies has inter­rup­ted that pro­cess. I’m hop­ing to have some­thing for you here on Tuesday of next week, still in plenty of time for the oth­er legs of the of the festival.

Where to watch A Real Pain

Aotearoa, Australia, Ireland & UK : Streaming on Disney+

Canada: Streaming on Disney+ or Crave

India: Not cur­rently avail­able online

USA: Streaming on Hulu