A Real Pain ★★★★☆ (film review)
As Hollywood star Jesse Eisenberg produced, wrote, acted in and directed this film, you would have expected him to get the stand-out role.
The fact that he didn’t is worth noting, in an industry not known to reward self-effacement.
A Real Pain is a bittersweet comedy that follows a tried-and-true formula: the outrageous eccentric vs the straight man. The odd couple here are Jewish American cousins who travel to Poland to visit to the concentration camp their grandmother survived.
Eisenberg plays the uptight family man, a techie who can’t say anything without immediately apologising. He acts as a foil to his bohemian, devil-may-care cousin, played by Kieran Culkin.
The latter generates all the dramatic tension and the good lines. He is also given depth. His showboating hides profound wounds. Alone, he is prone to catatonia: ahead of his flight, he stares into space for hours at JFK airport. With others, he’s both utterly inconsiderate and expert at reading the room.
His antics win over everyone in the Holocaust tour the pair join — although the quiet cousin, who shares hotel rooms with him and gets the full force of his chutzpah, finds him harder to cope with.
The supporting roles, starting with Eisenberg’s buttoned-up nerd, are terrific. The themes of ethnicity and identity are delicately touched on. The tour guide is a Brit — played by an Anglo-Japanese actor — who feels he needs to explain why he is qualified despite being neither Polish nor Jewish.
One of the participants is black, which seems odd until he tells his life story: he is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide who converted to Judaism.
The notion of solidarity between Tutsis and Jews — two peoples who recovered from mass slaughter to rule small states — is thought-provoking. Not that Eisenberg dwells on it, but the conceit makes for a quirky scene where an African educates a Brooklyn Jew (the Eisenberg character, who is not religious) about sacraments.
The ghost of the grandmother — the reason behind the cousins’ pilgrimage — also plays a subtle but pervasive role.
A Real Pain sometimes lays it on too thick. Towards the end, the nerdish cousin breaks down and spills his heart about a suicidal kinsman he both loves and can’t stand. The viewer didn’t need this tearful catharsis to work out that the subject was a damaged bully.
But ever the self-effacing gentleman, Eisenberg quietly leaves the stage to give the last scene to Culkin (SPOILER ALERT). On their return to JFK, the cousins part. The oddball decides to stay in the terminal, sits down and stares into space.
