A Real Pain (Eisenberg, 2024)

A Real Pain is a good, not great, film.

The film depicts two Jewish brothers cousins (Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin) on a “heritage” tour of Poland and concludes with them visiting the site of their recently deceased grandmother’s house. Eisenberg is David, the normal cousins with a job and family. Culkin plays Benji, the relative who resides in the murky area between family f— up and perpetually helpless adolescent.

The film’s press kit and advertising invoke The Odd Couple, and that comparison is on point but insufficient. Benji’s casual grooming habits are but one of the ways he exasperates the fastidious David. He’s the social equivalent of an unleashed puppy, smothering friends and strangers alike with relentless, spunky, energy. But every time Benji is a jerk is carefully balanced with an instance of him being disarmingly and refreshingly honest. He has the ability to forge the sort of intimate and authentic connections with others that David longs for when he isn’t too embarrassed to admit it.

If anything, Benji’s virtues and flaws are a bit too neatly balanced for my taste, eventually taking on the calculated balance of a screenplay rather than suggesting the messy complexity of real life. Eisenberg also suffers a bit from a tendency shared by many a more experienced screenwriter. He frustratingly has characters (usually his own) vocalize and underline a scene’s point, not trusting the interaction itself to make it for him. The classic example here is a scene in a restaurant with other tourists in which David explains that he both loves and hates Benji. It is continued with a climactic scene in which David tells Benji pretty much the same thing he told the tourists an hour earlier and has been telling us all movie.

In a lesser movie, Benji would be more charmingly mentally ill (or neurodivergent), and I did appreciate Eisenberg’s resistance to making Benji so endearing that we would end up scornful of David rather than empathetic with him. Thirty, or forty years ago, Benji was the sort of character that would have been played by Billy Crystal or Robin Williams, and the film’s trailer would have carefully presented every half-laugh devoid of context to make it appear to be a comedy. As the title A Real Pain suggests, the film sees Benji’s quirks as not only being a pain for David but caused by a pain of his own. That David knows this all along rather than suddenly discovering it in an Oscar-bait epiphany is to the film’s credit and what keeps it, for me, on the positive side of rotten/fresh line.