A Real Pain Resists Dramedy Cliches, Landing on Something Sadder and Stranger

Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain looks to be built from the kind of recipe that any lover of awards season indie dramedy vanity projects expects to be able to discern and begin digesting within moments: A familiar blend of, oh, let’s say 40% gentle comedy, 30% teary drama and 30% cathartic affirmation. That’s how the trailers will no doubt go out of their way to cast A Real Pain, because fitting it to that kind of uplifting indie dramedy mold–everybody’s got problems, but we learn from each other’s differences and marginally improve ourselves in 90 minutes–is the easiest way to angle this kind of story into becoming worthy of your aunt or grandmother’s Sunday matinee dollars. And watching Eisenberg’s travelogue story about two Jewish cousins ambling through Poland as they reckon with their family’s Holocaust-tinged history and a half lifetime of relationships growing apart, it’s easy enough to see how simply A Real Pain could have been bolted to that familiar structure. It’s to the film’s credit that its writer-director resists pretty much every one of those conventional impulses, steering his breezy but meandering story in unexpected directions, letting it simply develop into a character portrait of two emotionally polarized individuals.

When we meet cousins David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) it’s in an airport as they prepare to embark on a trip of great ancestral significance, traveling to Poland to participate in a Jewish historical tour in honor of their recently deceased grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who played an outsized role in their family hierarchy, having been particularly close with Benji until her passing. The latter has since clearly fallen into depression, something etched in the fatigue lines of Culkin’s face from the moment we first see him on an airport bench, desultorily scanning the unfamiliar faces as they swirl around him. Both cousins likely see the trip as some kind of conduit for emotional outpouring or transformation, but the relative lack of it ultimately afforded to them is seemingly part of Eisenberg’s thesis: We plan for events like a vacation to change who we are as people, but we’re naive to view change as something so transactional. Throughout, A Real Pain resists the gravitational pull of storytelling convention that insists upon clean character arcs and affirming revelations, opting for a more realistic journey in which it’s difficult to say what, if anything, has truly changed. This both makes the film interesting as a narrative experiment and no doubt frustrating to a subset of the multiplex audience weaned on weepy dramedies of this sort, in which everyone ultimately learns the specific lesson their character requires to unlock growth, like an RPG character earning XP.

Viewed as the comedy its trailers will be implying, A Real Pain’s title would be a reference to the experience of two odd couple relatives being thrust back into close proximity and emotional distance after the slow dissolution of the former bond they once possessed as younger men. From a more distant viewpoint, however, the title is less concrete, more an acknowledgement of not just the mundane hurt experienced by both David and Benji, but also their entitlement, the universal entitlement possessed by the later descendants of generations who underwent a truly exceptional degree of suffering, as the film’s eventual trip to the Majdanek concentration camp cannot help but illustrate. A “how dare you believe you really know what it is to lose?” mentality. A real pain.

David is on the neurotic, insecure and cloistered side–truly a shock, for a character played by Jesse Eisenberg–a family man who designs irritating online ad banners for a living, loves his young son, but finds it difficult to genuinely connect with others, including the motley collection of diverse Jewish travelers joining himself and Benji on the tour. His cousin at one point describes David as “an awesome guy, stuck inside the body of someone who’s always running late,” which accurately conveys the way David’s anxiety tends to insert itself between the situation and his ability to be genuinely present in it. David, on the other hand, sees his lack of effusiveness as more or less a public service, having long since convinced himself that the “adult” thing to do is to not leak performative emotion in the direction of strangers, that the morally upstanding choice for a functional person is to not burden the rest of the world with your personal anguish. David carries the same grief as his cousin, but recognizes that “my pain is unexceptional,” and thus discounts it. But at the same time, he can’t help but simultaneously admire and resent his cousin’s far more carefree attitude, Eisenberg’s gaze conveying both awe and loathing at the way Benji operates.

Benji, on the other hand, is the very model of effusive sincerity, which is both his strength and a source of major irritation. A listless but gregarious stay-at-home slacker by nature, he’s the kind of guy who has coasted through life with the help of his affable and sensitive nature, suddenly unbalanced now thanks to the seeming fracturing of his protective status quo after the death of his grandmother. He’s the film’s puzzle box, a riddle of a character whose spontaneity makes him impossible to predict, and Culkin makes him both sympathetic and insufferable in equal measure. Everything he says, he means, whether that’s complimenting the shape and lack of blemishes on David’s feet, or castigating his fellow tour members for not always being struck by the same hyper-emotionality as he is as they process sites of historical tragedy. Where David arguably has too much regulation, Benji has less than none. This gives him an admirable power to break the ice with seemingly anyone, his disarming sincerity and lack of trepidation instantly charming the individual members of the tour group the moment he meets them. But at the same time, his total absence of a filter and compulsive need to expel his emotional outbursts is also likely to quickly lead to friction with those same people, confrontations that Benji never makes the slightest effort to avoid. He simply doesn’t care if he makes the people around him uncomfortable with his honesty, or with strong opinions rooted in the seeming belief that hiding your pain from your daily interactions builds an inauthentic, poisoned soul. David sums him up with the following: “You light up a room, and then shit on everything inside it.”

In your typical feel-good indie dramedy, this dynamic between the two would build expectations that Benji’s character would fall into what is more or less a manic pixie dream boy archetype, the guy whose scriptural function is to teach the staid David a lesson about “opening up” and accessing a more authentic self. There are some modest inklings of this, as in a sequence where the two miss their train stop and Benji leads David in a low-stakes mission in fare jumping and conductor evasion as they get back on a train going the opposite direction, but these are merely footnotes in a story that never truly sees the two having it out in direct confrontation. David’s most authentic outburst in expressing his frustration with Benji comes not to his cousin’s face, but to the rest of the group when Benji isn’t present. Even when the pair finally engages in what seems meant to be their grand final argument, the one where the walls of politeness finally drop away, it falls far short of the characters truly unburdening themselves from everything we know is on their minds. Even then, much of the dynamic between cousins exists in the unspoken space between them, in the silences rather than in the dialog. It’s not narratively tidy, but it does ring true to life.

It all ultimately leads Eisenberg’s film back to where it began: An airport terminal, Kieran Culkin’s haunted eyes, and an uncertain future, the director refusing to wrap up his narrative with the sort of pleasing, comforting bow that would probably help its commercial appeal in the holiday season. A Real Pain denies the audience most of the warmth they’re likely expecting in a conclusion, opting as it consistently does for quiet verisimilitude in its stead. At times wryly funny, in other moments profoundly sad, it’s a competent but occasionally sedate dramedy that demonstrates Eisenberg’s willingness to buck narrative convention and leave his characters still questing for deeper meaning.

Director: Jesse Eisenberg
Writer: Jesse Eisenberg
Stars: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy, Daniel Oreskes
Release date: Nov. 15, 2024

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter for more film writing.