A Masterclass In Characterisation: A Real Pain Review

Bethany Lee

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Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (2024) is heartwarming, amusing, and a masterclass in characterisation.

A Real Pain follows Jewish American cousins Benji (Kieran Culkin) and David (Eisenberg) as they travel to Poland to honour their late grandmother. Joining a small tour group through Warsaw, they battle their internal pain, their pains with each other, and the pain of their ancestors.

This road-trip comedy marks Eisenberg’s second feature film as a writer/director and is a co-production between Poland and the US. It’s equal parts heartwarming, heartbreaking, funny, and sad. It belongs on your watchlist, and here’s why.

A MASTERCLASS IN CHARACTERISATION

You understand these characters within five minutes of meeting them. Their strong personalities are completely distinct before they even board the plane.

“Neither is perfect, but you root and care for them”

Ultimately, they are foils to each other. David is highly strung, slightly awkward, stable, and diligent; Benji is unpredictable, charismatic, manic, and volatile. While David is married with a child and a job in marketing; Benji lives in his mother’s basement. David thinks his pain “is unremarkable” and doesn’t want to “burden” anybody with it; Benji feels everything intensely and shows it.

Neither is perfect, but you root and care for them, for their bond, and for their journey.

Culkin delivers a standout performance and Eisenberg writes his character to steal the show. You want to keep up with his energy, but his mood swings frequently throw you off course.

He contradicts himself throughout. One second, he’s recreating a battlefield scene with memorial statues and the next he’s having an explosive outburst about the inappropriateness of being in first class on a train their ancestors would have been shoved in the back of. He’s likable, but confusing.

The other characters on the tour don’t have much to them individually. They have their own stories, but for the most part it seems they’re there to mirror the audience’s response to the two central characters. They look for clues to their familial relationship and the reasons for their tensions just as we do. We watch them get sucked into Benji’s fun, then become awkward and pity him in his low moments.

“Eisenberg’s performance is not to be overlooked”

It’s Benji’s film. When the tour group departs from the cousins, they pour their emotional goodbyes into him whilst David gets a simple wave or pat on the shoulder.

However, it was David’s character that struck audiences. Perhaps a sense of relatability to the control freak watching their free-spirited counterparts with equal concern, disapproval, and jealousy. Eisenberg’s performance is not to be overlooked, there’s perhaps no one who could play an awkward character so well.

Culkin’s Oscar nomination for best supporting character, and Eisenberg’s for best screenplay, couldn’t be more deserved.

A LOVE LETTER TO POLAND AND A STARK LOOK AT THE PAST

A Real Pain turns Poland into a character of its own. The backdrop isn’t intrusive, it isn’t tourism propaganda. Instead, it transpires as a beautiful homage to a country covered in dark history.

Eisenberg has spoken of the conflict he felt casting a non-Jewish actor to play Benji. He comes from a secular Jewish background himself, and his ancestors were Holocaust victims and survivors. But the film doesn’t quiver in its Polish charm, held up by Warsaw-born cinematographer Michał Dymek’s slow shots and a score almost entirely comprised of piano pieces by Frédéric Chopin.

“The film doesn’t try to do too much and in doing so, does a lot”

Whilst framing its beauty, the film takes a stark look at the past. Eisenberg depicts the sequence in which the tour group visit the Majdanek concentration camp through still, slow, silent shots. The audience experiences it as the characters do and share in the heaviness of their reactions.

Themes of grief, loss, and our relationship to the past are strong throughout without overpowering the overall story.

PERFECTLY PACED AND IMPACTFUL TO THE END

In a time of two-and-a-half-hour plus feature length films, Eisenberg proves that a lot can be achieved in just 90 minutes.

“A Real Pain feels like a breath of fresh air amongst recent releases”

The film doesn’t try to do too much and in doing so, does a lot. It takes you on a journey through Poland, through the past, through characters’ sadness, through human connection and disconnection.

There’s nothing too crazy in it, as Benji and David themselves exclaim when they reach their late grandmother’s house: “it’s so… unremarkable.” And yet, it packs a punch; it stays with you.

However, the biggest punch came at the end. The film concludes with the same shot it begins with: Benji waiting in the airport. As the title comes back on screen, on the opposite side to the beginning, it reigns home the multi-faceted meaning of the title, and the multi-faceted nature of the film and life itself.

A Real Pain feels like a breath of fresh air amongst recent releases despite its less-than-extravagant plot and style. It has gone straight from Eisenberg’s heart and into my top movies of the year.

p.s. Benji and Martha definitely did it.

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