A Real Pain

Raise your hand if you had a Holocaust buddy comedy starring the would-be breakout teen leads of middling 2002 films emerging as one of the best works of 2024. Now, keep it up because A Real Pain is a real delight.

Every few years, Jesse Eisenberg seems to act in one of the best things around. The Squid and the Whale. Zombieland. The Social Network. The End of the Tour. FX’s “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” In between, Eisenberg disappears. Not literally. There he was unwrapping Jolly Ranchers in one of 2016’s most maligned but most seen superhero movies. If you’ve looked for him, you’ve also seen him in other places, working with accomplished filmmakers like Joachim Trier and Kelly Reichardt in under-the-radar fare. But just when the general public begins to forget about him, Eisenberg resurfaces in a major way, displaying his knack for picking projects of substance and then helping them exceed their potential.

Now, Eisenberg is making magic from the ground up as the writer-director of A Real Pain. Two estranged Jewish cousins join a tour group to see where in Poland their recently deceased grandmother lived and survived the Holocaust eighty years earlier. This film is kind of like Due Date, if Woody Allen wrote and directed it, and you’ll just have to believe me that that’s actually a winning combination.

Eisenberg collaborated with Allen twice before Hollywood ran the aging New Yorker out of town over accusations that district attorneys declined to charge or prosecute more than thirty years ago. There’s none of Allen’s romantic or sexual comedy here, but a distinct awareness of how history and culture shape the present. That isn’t to say that Eisenberg is employing techniques that peaked in the late 1970s. The seasoned actor brings a modern-day perspective and a light, deft hand to explore how people cope with, well, real pain.

At first sight, this appears to be a light comedy as David (Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) meet at an American airport after an unanswered half-dozen anxious voicemails. The two are the same age and were close friends in childhood, but they’ve drifted apart. David, who lives in New York City, has a career selling banner ads, a wife, a child. Benji, who resides hours away upstate in Binghamton, has none of those things. Benji’s been in a rough place since losing the grandmother he describes as his favorite person in the world. David recognizes that by carving out a week and planning the trip they had long intended to take, now with money left behind for this very undertaking by their beloved, departed ancestor.

The contrast of personalities makes for an instantly entertaining study, with the candid, improvisational Benji irritating the neurotic and composed David. That’s clear to us, but not really to Benji, whose mind seems to be on other matters, like the brick of marijuana he has sent overseas to himself.

The cousins join the small tour group that brings the film’s principal cast to seven, each traveler becoming familiar to us. There’s the blindsided divorcee Marcia (Dirty Dancing‘s Jennifer Grey), Rwandan refugee and Jewish convert Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), an aging couple (Daniel Oreskes and Liza Sadovy), and the group’s clinical British guide James (Will Sharpe).

The trip is not without some bumps. There’s the train ride where Benji freaks out about being in First Class and the cousins get separated from the others. There is a meltdown at the cemetery holding Poland’s oldest gravestone. And there are nightly escapades to rooftops where Benji and, cautiously, David go through that therapeutic brick.

A Real Pain is a very funny film that sneakily is full of pathos. The surface level clashes hint at deeper concerns that are on the minds of both cousins but not their mouths. The struggle to address these issues gives the trip meaning, as our two leads wrestle with self-discovery, understanding, and reconciliation. It’s fascinating and stirring material and it’s handled so tastefully and compellingly by Eisenberg, who is picking up only his second credit as writer-director.

This is a vast improvement over Eisenberg’s directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World (2022), which itself is not nearly as bad as its online scores indicate. That Sundance-premiered, A24-acquired dramedy, adapted from Eisenberg’s Audie Award-winning Audible audio drama, had some intriguing notions on modern family dynamics and performative activism. A Real Pain effortlessly goes further, speaking to contemporary times, fragmented families, and our evolving sense of identity. It’s remarkable how much emotional weight Eisenberg is able to pack into a fairly light-hearted film that runs just 90 minutes and feels even shorter.

While Eisenberg deserves much credit for crafting such a fine and rich piece of modern fiction (and may yet win an original screenplay Oscar), he also accepts the less flashy role as performer, allowing Kieran Culkin to shine like he never has before, at least to someone who’s never seen HBO’s widely celebrated “Succession.” How wild it is for Culkin, who just turned 42, to pick up what appears to be only his third leading film role in a career that extends all the way back to the 1990 blockbuster Home Alone. You probably remember him as Pepsi-chugging, bed-wetting Fuller, cousin to protagonist Kevin McCallister (real life older brother Macaulay Culkin).

Kieran’s career has experienced much ebb and flow over the years, putting him in high-profile films like Father of the Bride, The Cider House Rules, She’s All That, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World but only a few roles he could really sink his teeth into. Then, came “Succession.” Thirty-nine episodes and one Emmy later, people at last know him as more than just “a Culkin” or “Macaulay’s brother.” Frankly, from the early morning hours of January 17th onward, he should be known as Academy Award-nominated actor Kieran Culkin. Quite possibly, that label should be replaced by “Academy Award winner Kieran Culkin” six weeks later.

Culkin’s tour-de-force performance serves A Real Pain exceptionally well. His pain wrapped in comic charm recalls in some way John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles, an amazing film you can see some parallels in here. Talk about coming full circle: that film’s late, great writer-director John Hughes also wrote Home Alone, Culkin’s iconic film debut released 34 years ago nearly to the very day that A Real Pain expands nationwide.

There’s a fine line between aping what Hughes did in Planes, Trains and actually embodying it. Green Book aped. A Real Pain embodies and with no shortage of ideas of its own. This terrific, haunting little movie is one to see and it immediately makes Eisenberg a filmmaker to watch.