A Real Pain

“This will be a tour about pain,” cautions James, the earnest British guide shepherding a group of American Jews on a tour of Poland. The small group includes David and Benji, two cousins from New York on a visit to Poland to honour their recently deceased grandmother Dori, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. Best known for this starring role as Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg writes, directs and stars in this holocaust comedy playing David, who like Eisenberg, suffers from OCD and anxiety disorder. David has a regular job, a wife and child and uses pills to deal with his anxiety. He’s socially awkward and envies Benji’s ease and charm. Benji road-rolls his cousin and trivialises his life choices.

The first time we meet Benji (Kieran Culkin), he’s aimlessly floating around in an airport. Seated in the waiting area with his ear pods plugged in, one can immediately spot the melancholy in his eyes. He appears to be curious about people – observing them closely. There’s a good chance that if someone around him was in need, Benji would be one of the first persons to help. But he’s also a wildcard, who wouldn’t respond to his cousin David’s (Jesse Eisenberg) voicemails, and that too on the day they’re supposed to travel to Poland together. Has he woken up? Has he left? Is he on time? Where is he? Does he remember they have a flight? No response.

A Real Pain, starring Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins, is exactly the kind of film you imagine if Eisenberg and Culkin played cousins. It’s funny, awkward, edgy, poignant, light, chatty, alert, minor-key and Sundancey (an adjective for the brand of tragicomic American quirk that the snowy festival loves to showcase). There are echoes of the uptight mom and no-filter teen from the actor’s directorial debut, When You Finish Saving The World, in the uptight David (Eisenberg) and the free-spirited-but-troubled Benji (Culkin). Family man David and drifter Benji head to Poland to process their Jewish heritage through a guided Holocaust tour and, more importantly, visit their late camp-survivor grandmother’s childhood home. As in most movies, it’s the interiority of the oddball journey that matters.