Jesse Eisenberg’s second feature film, A Real Pain, creates a meditative yet powerful approach to grief and generational trauma.
★★★★☆
Sometimes it’s hard to wonder what true pain and loss are in our current world. Sure, we may feel things, but quite quickly we realise how dysfunctional our emotions are in everyday life. There are bills to pay, work to do, emotions to upkeep and most importantly, we need to make sure we look like we’re okay to everyone else. It’s like James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem said on ‘Someone Great’: “The coffee isn’t even bitter, because what is the difference? There’s all the work that needs to be done and it’s late for revision / There’s all the time and all the planning and songs to be finished”. Unfortunately, life doesn’t stop when someone important leaves but if you acknowledge that, you’re the crazy one.
A Real Pain is the story of two cousins: David (Jesse Eisenberg), a family man, digital marketing man and altogether a stable man of his age and Benji (Kieran Culkin), a slacker still stuck in his mother’s basement with a loud mouth and no filter to speak of. The pair reconnect to embark on a trip to Poland to visit the home of their recently passed grandmother. Through this journey and a tour of the history of the Holocaust in Poland, brings up questions and revelations both men have not considered as they work through the thorns of their relationship, their Jewish identity and how they deal with loss.
While A Real Pain is comedic and is full of laugh out loud moments, it is also quiet and spacious. This balance creates a supremely enjoyable film but also a profound one- allowing the depth of these two characters to leave you pondering about your own existence past its runtime.
Heavily leaning on performances and dialogue, both Eisenberg and Culkin stun and are perfect foils to one another. Eisenberg plays a more introverted character who believes in his grief not being a disturbance to the people/moments around him whilst Culkin’s Benji, who couldn’t keep an honest thought in for his life, whether it’s charming or disarming, always has a perspective that he cannot help but share. Both of these characters subtly butt heads ideologically throughout the film until the wall breaks and both men are forced to understand each other on a level that has not previously been considered.
A Real Pain uniquely explores grief from the perspective of second/third generation immigrants. When these atrocities are committed against people who look just like you exist and are right in front of you, what does that mean for one’s middle class lifestyle? Are we to walk around with our heads down in shame, mourning what we had lost several decades ago or shut it out to enjoy the fruits of our labour in the present? The film specifically covers this in regards to the Holocaust and Jewish identity but also resonates as an outsider of the film’s background, but also as a child of immigration and colonisation. It’s not to say A Real Pain attempts to speak for everyone, but its sense of emotion is strong enough to feel universal.
Even while it deals with all these huge ideas, A Real Pain keeps it pretty light and simple in its regard to filmmaking. It’s a film that pleasantly showcases its locations from New York to Warsaw, but the real strength in Eisenberg’s direction is creating an environment that doesn’t feel laboured over but real so that his filmmaking doesn’t take centre stage and the audience can invest in these characters quite easily as if they’re a fly on the wall. This isn’t a style that is too dissimilar from many independent comedy filmmakers from America, but Eisenberg finds specificity in his writing and his filmmaking is there to embolden it.
The Verdict
A Real Pain is not only a great exploration of grief with the use of character relationships, performances and dialogue, but also a film with such an inescapable tone. It’s sombre, slow and contemplative beyond its own runtime, reminiscent of the work of American comedy/drama auteurs like Jim Jarmusch but with a bit more traditional plot structure. Playing simple and bare is sometimes all we need to do.
Words by Ellis Lamai
A Real Pain premiered at London Film Festival on October 13th
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