The first time we meet Benji (Kieran Culkin), he’s aimlessly floating around in an airport. Seated in the waiting area with his ear pods plugged in, one can immediately spot the melancholy in his eyes. He appears to be curious about people – observing them closely. There’s a good chance that if someone around him was in need, Benji would be one of the first persons to help. But he’s also a wildcard, who wouldn’t respond to his cousin David’s (Jesse Eisenberg) voicemails, and that too on the day they’re supposed to travel to Poland together. Has he woken up? Has he left? Is he on time? Where is he? Does he remember they have a flight? No response.
Compensating for their cumulative anxiety, David calls him five times between leaving his apartment and the airport. He knows about Benji’s mercurial ways, and therefore walks on eggshells around him. David has made peace with his unremarkable life – where his own comfort can be compromised. This trip is the duo’s way of honouring their recently-deceased grandmother – a survivor of the concentration camps – who left them money for this trip to see where she’s from. What starts off as equal parts escape and an obligation, becomes an emotionally-fraught and ultimately wholesome trip between brothers who have lost touch.
Eisenberg – who has written and directed the film – uses the outline of a light, travel film, and revises it into a character-study of the ‘failure’ in the family. As is apparent from the very first scene, Benji is yet to take up a conventional career. He lives in his mother’s basement, smoking marijuana and coasting through life. On the other hand, David is a fully-functional adult with a wife and a son – selling digital ad banners for a living.
They used to be close at one point, but the paths of the brothers veered in different directions. Pushing 40, Benji seems to try to hold on to his youthful idealism, something he resents David for having traded to become another one of the numbed working class. Benji doesn’t have David’s rigour to build a life for himself, but David clearly admires the way Benji can walk into a room and charm them with his wit, and his reckless manner of speaking.
The duo join an eclectic heritage tour group led by a British tour guide, James (Will Sharpe) – the group includes Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a recently-divorced woman from New York; Mark (Daniel Oreskes) and Diane (Lisa Sadovy), a middle-aged couple; and Rwanda-born Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), who fled the genocide to Winnipeg (Canada) and converted to Judaism.
Evidently, Benji and David might be travelling light with a backpack each on the tour – but they’re also carrying the baggage of being descendants of someone who survived by many, many miracles. How that trauma has trickled down the generations and taken different forms, is something Eisenberg’s film seems interested in. Benji showcases depressive tendencies, while David is seemingly on medication for his OCD behaviour. The only difference is that while Benji indulges his highs and lows, living with abandon (because he probably doesn’t know the alternative), David considers his pain ‘unexceptional’ and finds a way to mask it under a socially-acceptable exterior.
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A Real Pain throws up some interesting questions through Benji and David. During a scene where the group is in the first-class compartment of a train in Poland, Benji throws up a fit about how nobody else sees the irony of the moment. David is apologetic to the rest of the group for Benji’s meltdown, but as some other group members note in a later scene, is David only doing that to avoid dealing with the deeper truths of a situation? “Ignoring the proverbial slaughterhouse to enjoy the steak,” as someone puts it. In a different scene, Benji confronts James for taking away from the visceral impact of the tour with his ‘factoids’. It’s a strangely hilarious, uncomfortable scene, which concludes on a graceful note with James paying heed to Benji’s (constructive) feedback.
This film is a true showcase for Eisenberg – the director, operating with restraint, doing what he knows, making a film with conviction; without ever indulging himself. Benji and David’s warmth, their wordless tension and the mutual fondness for grandmother, becomes the crux of it. Eisenberg revels in multiple scenes where one brother stares at the other, while they’re asleep. Where people, despite their grouse with each other, take pleasure in someone else’s peace.
Culkin, who became a phenomenon on HBO’s Succession as the foul-mouthed Roman Roy, shows similar traits as the fast-talking Benji, saying the darndest things. It’s the author-backed role in the film, allowing Culkin to play Benji like a symphony – bringing to life an insufferable, generous and flawed person. The surprise, however, lies in Eisenberg’s stoic performance as David. who sticks in Benji’s shadow for the entirety of the film, until he’s exasperated by it. What’s miraculous is how comfortable Eisenberg feels to bask in the afterglow of Culkin’s one-for-the-ages performance.
A Real Pain is set against the backdrop of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust – but it’s also about the trauma within, which can’t be articulated. Some feel too much, while others feel too little. Who is right? As the film suggests, one must try to find a balance between the two. Whether one feels too much or nothing at all – neither can be an excuse to do nothing.
