Movie info via Sundance
Mismatched cousins David and Benji reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother. The adventure takes a turn when the pair’s old tensions resurface against the backdrop of their family history.
Writer-director Jesse Eisenberg (When You Finish Saving the World, 2022 Sundance Film Festival) returns to the Festival with a poignant, funny exploration of the unexpected permutations of intergenerational trauma. Eisenberg’s intimate, resonant script complements the tension and humor of the two very different cousins’ tumultuous road trip with a sensitively drawn reckoning of the legacy of World War II among the survivors of survivors.
While Benji’s irreverent charm only partially masks his deep melancholy, David’s frustration with and genuine love for his cousin become achingly clear. Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin give devastating, funny performances as characters grappling with their grandmother’s history and the ways their own lives have diverged. Michał Dymek’s eloquent cinematography and a Chopin-driven score bind the tour group’s complicated, emotional reaction to the Polish setting into the texture of the film.—HZ
Review
A Real Pain, Jessie Eissenberg’s second feature as a director, is about Holocaust guilt, personal anguish, how to reconcile the epic pain of history with living morally and truthfully with the common obscenities and indecencies of today’s world.
Surprisingly, Eissenberg has achieved this reconciliation within the light strictures of the road-trip movie. Eissenberg, who also wrote the screenplay, has rooted A Real Pain in his family’s history. His mother was a Catholic Pole, a classical pianist who played and loved Chopin. The soundtrack of A Real Pain, entirely Chopin centric, is a gentle Easter Egg to that part of his heritage. In addition, the piano pieces heard are played by the Israeli-Canadian virtuoso Tyzi Erez.
The movie shows a generosity of spirit, a sort of soulful maturity not usually seen in Eissenberg’s typical character portrayals. His David is a moderately uptight New Yorker and internet ad salesman (typical for him) with a nice wife and young son but who seems both well adjusted, level headed, mature and experienced wizened. His grandmother, a Holocaust survivor and immigrant as well as a successful businesswoman, has recently passed away. He is funding a road trip to visit a trip to Poland to see both the concentration camp she was interned in and her childhood home.
Accompanying him, is his troubled cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) who is possibly bipolar with frequent manic depressive swings. The two were once close but have drifted apart.
Their relationship dynamics is captured in scenes that balances David’s inner hyper acuity with Benji’s overt emotionalism and howling raw no filter honesty. There’s a sense that Benji is really the symbolic expression of David’s inner self. The trip is both his and their therapy and cure. It’s also Eissenberg’s. The house the cousins visit at the end really is his grandmother’s.
Benji’s exists to embarrass his cousin with his behavior and still be the howling cry of a soul grieving and in pain. He’s also charming and can easily convince people to do the silly things he craves and needs. Benji is flaky, moody, always reflecting on the places they visit and trying to reconcile the horrors committed there with his moral being. He’s, in essence, the walking talking theme and the pain of A Real Pain. Benji’s troubled history is handled sensitively by Eissenberg, especially the big reveal.
There are still scenes that are overwritten and play out to long but Eissenberg’s sophomore feature shows nice judgement in the way it balances the sardonic with the solemn. In A Real Pain no emotion is unearned.
A Real Pain gets a 3.5/ or a B+.
It’s streaming as part of Sundance 2024 . The virtual part of the festival runs from January 25-28.
Credits:
Directed by
Written by
Jesse Eisenberg
Produced by
- Jesse Eisenbergy
- Ali Herting
- Jennifer Semler
- Ewa Puszczyńska
Starring
- Jesse Eisenberg
- Kurt Egyiawan
Cinematography
Michal Dymek
Edited by
Robert Nassau
Production
companies
- Topic Studios
- Fruit Tree
- Extreme Emotions
Release date
- January 20, 2024(Sundance)
Running time
90 minutes[1]
Countries
- United States
- Poland
Language
English
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