A Real Pain

December 13 – 17

friday – tuesday

7:00 pm nightly
1:30 Sunday Matinée
14A — 1hr 35min
2024 ‧ Comedy / Adventure

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg Becomes a major Filmmaker — and Kieran Culkin a movie star — in a funny, knife-sharp odyssey. Eisenberg the actor reveals his major chops as a writer-director in this road movie about two Jewish cousins trekking through Poland on a “Holocaust tour.” There’s lots of ramshackle comedy in A Real Pain: Eisenberg and Culkin are wonderful together—they spar and tumble like kittens playing with a ball. The movie is so entertaining that you barely notice the melancholy shadow that starts to creep over it; that’s when you realize you’re in the hands of an expert but decidedly unshowy filmmaker.

Beautifully written and brilliantly performed, this simple and effective roadtrip buddy dramedy is equally hilarious and heartfelt. Selecting Chopin (Polish!) as the sole soundtrack elevates this little gem as well. How much external expression one should attempt to not lose connection with the world, and how much internal processing one must endure to stay functioning in this cruel world? Why do we love and admire some family members yet at the same time almost intentionally detach from the family? A Real Pain is full of blustery talk about a great many things, and the suffering embedded in Jewish history — the way the past speaks to the present ­— is one of them. But only one. David, the straight arrow of the two, is played by Eisenberg in a baseball cap as a vintage Jesse character — earnest and uptight, with a compressed delivery that expresses his nervous nature, yet this is no millennial Woody Allen caricature.

What’s most wonderful about the movie is its radiant generosity. Eisenberg’s performance is terrific, muted and hyperkinetic in all the right ways. But most often, he’s subtly directing attention to his co-star. Culkin is extraordinary. His Benji is full of beans, often blurting out the wrong thing that somehow, mysteriously, ends up being the right thing. “Davers and I are cousins!” he announces brightly to the other members of the tour group during their first meeting, and we can feel Dave’s conflicted discomfort. Sometimes he cringes at Benji’s crazed buoyancy, especially when his cousin uses it as a kind of weapon: “You used to feel everything, man,” Benji tells him, a comment that comes with a twinge of passive-aggressiveness. But he’s also kind of right. Dave has forgotten the joy of spontaneity; Benji brings it back.