A Real Pain is one of those low-budget, independent films that make you glad that someone out there is still making great little low-budget independent films.
It’s a stripped-down buddy film about two cousins with a strong love-hate relationship on a very personal journey. As with many movies like this, their personalities couldn’t be further apart. David Kaplan (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is the strait-laced, middle-class family man, with a wife and toddler who earns his living creating internet ads. Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) is his cousin who he has known since childhood.
They share Jewish roots and a recently deceased grandmother whom they both loved. Benji is a troubled, free-spirited, loner of a man, loveable, but plagued by dark demons and churning internal turmoil.
In David’s words, Benji is the kind of guy who lights up the room and then proceeds to piss off everyone in it. It’s a fair assessment.
The two meet at the airport, about to embark on a very personal, emotional journey to Poland where their beloved grandmother grew up, before being sent to a Nazi concentration camp where she miraculously escaped death before emigrating to America. She has bequeathed the two men the money to pay for the trip.
The complex, often strained relationship between the two men is what A Real Pain is all about. It’s clear that these two men love each other, but a lot gets in the way. They are emotional opposites—a modern day odd couple of sorts-- which makes for equal measures of comedy and drama.
David is Mister Normal, the voice of normalcy and reason. Benji, on the other hand, is a slightly crazed guy who simply can’t reel in his emotions. He’s a constant source of embarrassment and humiliation for David who spends a good deal of his time trying to explain Benji’s unpredictable behavior to the fellow members of their small tour group. In the words of the movie’s title, it’s a real pain.
As a movie character, Kieran Culkin’s Benji has much in common with Zac Galifianakis’s Alan character in the Hangover trilogy -- a troubled man with an impulsive Cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs kind of mentality. He’s a total whack job whose good intentions are perhaps his only saving grace.
While we’ve seen this kind of character before, Culkin brings his own signature acting style to Benji. He’s fun to watch. His offbeat acting approach is what made his Roman Roy character so addictively watchable in the Succession series. Once again, his performance is nuanced and a joy to behold, moment by moment.
Eisenberg essentially plays the straight man/second banana to Culkin. He’s the tortured guy trying to love his dear cousin despite major concerns about his cousin’s mental health and emotional stability. The Eisenberg/Culkin chemistry works well.
Admittedly, one could argue that not much happens in A Real Pain.
In many ways, it’s an uneventful trip compared to most contemporary road movies. It’s a toned-down, character-driven movie by and large, with the exception of one stop on the tour-- a trip to an actual former Nazi concentration camp. In the movie, it’s the place where their grandmother was imprisoned and escaped death a thousand times.
Worth mentioning here is the fact that this marks the first time that a feature film has been shot at an actual concentration camp. The sequence is haunting, showing the actual gas chambers and furnaces where the unspeakable, unimaginable atrocities took place during World War II. It’s a chilling, horrifying experience for everyone on screen as well as everyone in the audience.
A Real Pain is an exploration of all the things, past and present, that can turn us into psychologically damaged goods—the things that can haunt us and forever change the course of our everyday lives. It’s about the kind of hurt and pain that sometimes remains unremedied and unresolved.