AFI FEST 2024: A REAL PAIN

During a trip to Poland, Jesse Eisenberg had what he calls a ‘strange revelation’. A two-week trip through the country landed him at the tiny house in the village of Kranystaw, where his Aunt Doris had lived before the Holocaust displaced her entire family. “Had the war not happened, this is where I would be living,” Eisenberg remembers thinking. “What would my life be like? Who would I be?”

Twenty years later Eisenberg found himself back at that house, as the director, writer, and co-star of A Real Pain. In the film David (Eisenberg), a New Yorker and young father who goes on a tour of Polish Holocaust history accompanied by his cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) thanks to money left by their recently deceased grandmother. Joining a tour group, David and Benji rekindle their childhood bonds as they grapple with family tragedies of the past that still, in some ways, define them in the present.

With a beautifully crafted soundtrack of classical pieces, the audience not only has a front row seat to Benji and David’s journey, but become privy to Jewish history in Poland before the Nazi’s invaded. It makes one painfully aware of how history and the future can erase the past.  Images of oven, cages of show and blue stain residue on the walls from the gas used to exterminate millions of humans are incapsulated by a deep exhale from Benji. An image and sound that still lingers with me.

Culkin and Eisenberg are spectacular while rattling off rapid fire dialogue laced with complex emotions and duality that comes from being related.  Culkin’s maniacal energy and on the surface obnoxiousness reels the audience in from the moment he appears on the screen. His performance invokes empathy while simultaneously instigating the feeling of wanting to snatch a knot in his behind.  On the other end is Eisenberg, whose insecurities as David rule his every thought and feeling.  Ultimately, he sticks up for himself and you literally want to hit him with a ‘atta boy.’ for doing just that.

The supporting cast of characters which comprise the tour group include Jennifer Grey (Marsha), a divorcée, re- discovering who she originally was, or where she came from, Eloge (Kurt Egyiawa), a Rwandan-Canadian and a friendly Midwestern couple, played by Liza Sadovy and David Oreskes round out the cast perfectly.

It was particularly striking that Eisenberg included Eloge’s story, fleeing Rwanda and converting to Judaism and is the only person in the group who has experienced the trauma of genocide. This is a guy who knows firsthand what it’s like, not just a kind of upper middle class imagining. Though the group forms a bond over the course of their trip, the characters are so well-developed that the audience never loses sight of how different their experiences can be and have become.

A Real Pain is more than a story about two cousins who don’t always see eye to eye, but a story of how the real pain of the past has healing properties one may never see coming.