A Real Pain

dir: Jesse Eisenberg

2024

Oh the irony… I’m sure the irony isn’t lost on Jesse Eisenberg, that the title can have multiple meanings, and in fact clearly signposts, so people can’t blame him, how painful parts of this movie are.

And it’s not because it’s about a bunch of people who go on a tour through Poland that looks at the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis at the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin.

And they even do it voluntarily.

No, it’s about how two characters played by two jittery lunatics can be agitating and aggressively irritating just in very different ways. It’s a real showcase for the talents of two of the jitteriest jerks in this business we call show.

I mean Eisenberg has been playing minute variations on that theme for his whole career, but now Kieran Culkin, fairly famous for playing an absolute jerk failson in Succession as one of Logan Roy’s pathetic offspring, now gets to play a different type of jerk whose main difference is he has no money.

But he does run off at the mouth, with no filter or seeming knowledge of what he’s going to say next, constantly and continuously.

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) depart from New York flying to Poland in order to go on a tour in honour of their grandma who survived the Holocaust. Benji is already at the airport. David is on his way to the airport, and feels compelled to leave Benji between 10 and 20 voicemail messages, despite the fact that it is two hours before their flight leaves, and we know that Benji is already there, and not listening to any of them.

To say that I was already so agitated by David’s agitation would be a classic example of my charming capacity for understatement. I was so anxious already within the first few minutes that I just wanted to start walking away from the screen, perhaps walking into the sea, never to return.

But, come on, I’m made of sterner stuff than that, surely. A lot of people put a lot of work in to make this flick, and regardless of my feelings, it deserves my attention and my time.

In theory.

So though my anxiety was at an all time high, or at least as high as the last time I watched something either with Eisenberg / Zuckerberg in it, or the last time I watched Succession, which usually used to leave me a nervous wreck anyway, I strapped myself in anyway to watch this flick about two cousins who used to be close but these days not so much.

The other members of the tour are mostly touristy types, but Jewish as well, with the desire to visit the place from which their progenitors barely escaped with their lives. The person leading the tour isn’t Jewish (Will Sharpe), but James is super respectful at all times, and informative.

David holds himself apart from the group, or either pre-emptively alienates himself from the others, or is repelled by the group, as in, they don’t warm to him. It’s one of the few elements of the film that aren’t overwrought or over-explained, but I think Eisenberg knows what he’s doing in terms of the contrast he builds between himself and Benji.

Benji, of course, says whatever he says, does whatever he does, and delights the group. Even if he’s crass and insulting, mostly they don’t mind, or see in him something that justifies his abrasiveness. Everything he says makes the rest chuckle or entrances them: Everything David says falls on uncomfortable ears.

Yes, it’s very much a story about uncomfortable people being awkward with each other (which usually makes me want to put my head through a shredder) but I think, I think mainly it gets the balance right, because Eisenberg clearly knows who this character is that’s he’s playing. He is someone with a tremendous amount of anxiety and nervousness and social awkwardness, which is only exacerbated by the unusual nature of the tour, but he’s managed to build a life for himself, with employment, a wife and a child. He’s a high functioning anxious person. One of the main reasons for his anxiety is his cousin’s existence.

For all his (supposed) charisma, Benji is a mess of a person and his constant advice to David or anyone else feels particularly poorly thought out and nonsensical, and he seems to forget what he’s said moments after saying it. He has no more of an idea of what means anything in life than anyone else, but he rants with such (alleged) charm and conviction that people naturally gravitate towards him, or find his idiotic statements profound.

David watches all this from his comfortable distance, and resents Benji as well, for having that ease in social situations that he will never experience, but everything is further complicated by his guilt over not being in Benji’s life more, or not being able to protect him from himself.

For most of the tour the other members see one asshole who thinks he’s better than the rest of them, and who’s constantly apologising for his cousin, and they see another guy who’s says whatever he thinks and swears a lot, and occasionally makes an interesting point, but who seems a bit much, and that’s okay.

The pain that some people interpret the film’s title to be about, is easiest referred to as the grief both cousins might share about their grandmother’s death, but that’s too simple, and, in David’s case, probably not even accurate. Benji definitely grieves for his grandma, because she was the only person who he felt supported him, by also being the one who could cut through his bullshit, but the pain he’s living with seems bigger, more complicated.

The irony of the title I guess is supposed to be connected to where the tour is, what its purpose is meant to be, and that a person struggling with their own personal pain seems absurd when compared with what so many went through with the Holocaust, what so many didn’t survive. So, yes, we can feel our petty concerns and torments don’t compare to that enormity, but that doesn’t make our pain less real, less personal. We can’t forego expressing it or trying to live with it just because something far worse happened to other people.

We muddle through, feeling like we shouldn’t be such babies about what is, for us, real pain, and yet we have to integrate it into our lives, cope with it, lest it become somehow magnified, or lead to worse outcomes.

It’s no less real because of that, and yet that tension will always be there for some people, and some will cope like David, and some won’t cope like Benji, and no path is necessarily better than another.

As a film, overall, I found it quite enjoyable, despite how annoying both David and Benji are (in their own unique ways), because best of all it had no solutions, no Oscarbait moments where the strings swell, someone delivers the perfect soliloquy, then two people hug and everything is better for all time. The horror of seeing Majdanek, in all its banality, in the terror that it induces, is not treated either in a sensationalistic fashion, nor does it over-egg the pudding, so to speak. They’re already there. Something monumentally terrible happened there. It was two kilometres from the town centre, so everyone in Lublin knew. It speaks for itself, and I applaud Eisenberg’s restraint in not belabouring it.

An overtly ‘funny’ bit happens on the train, when the clearly bipolar Benji starts ranting that isn’t it offensively ironic that their parents or grandparents were packed like livestock and transported to these sites in order to die, and yet now they are travelling in luxury in first class? His argument sways no one else, since who wants to give up creature comforts, eh? But it does result in him storming off in disgust, in David apologising yet again to indifferent ears, but both of them end up missing the station they were meant to get off at.

When they sneak onto another train, and at Benji’s insistence avoid conductors in order to not have to pay for a ticket (which naturally gives David heart palpitations), and they end up in the first class section again, Benji response is hilarious, which I won’t spoil, but it also shows how little he cares about or even remembers any of the impassioned things he says.

Yes, they both give solid performances as very different flavours of annoying people. Perhaps that deserves to be celebrated. I also give credit to Eisenberg for avoiding a pat ending that neatly summed everything up and gave a pseudo-happily ever after vibe. It’s nothing of the sort. The ending is perhaps perfect, because it shows that Benji is as lost now as he was in the beginning.

Even then people will draw different meaning from that great last scene: some see hope, some see despair. Some see a person lost in a sea of faces, desperate for some connection; others will see someone happy in his element, in a place where strangers connect in heartfelt ways, endless possibilities etc.

To that I say “por qué no los dos?”, or why not both?

8 times my pain is real but everyone else’s pain makes them snowflakes out of 10

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“Dave, we're on a fucking Holocaust tour. If now isn't the time and place to grieve, to open up, then I don't know what to tell you, man.” - A Real Pain