Like everything else in A Real Pain (2024), the role of family comes with unknown consequences. The cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) Kaplan have decided to go on a trip to Poland to visit the homeland of their recently deceased grandmother. The chemistry is intricately laid out, where things as simple as maneuvering through an airport produces the antagonistic butting of heads. For Benji, this includes bothering the more neurotic David by pretending to illegally smuggle narcotics through security. His ability to poke David’s buttons remains a perfect folly for the larger story, providing a never-ending sense of dread as he’s thrust repeatedly into socially awkward situations.
Where similar comedies would maybe rib the viewer a bit too pointedly with this dynamic, Eisenberg’s script allows for something more organic to form underneath the surface. Through indirect action, he unravels what feels like decades of a relationship. There’s allusions to inside jokes, recalling their differing relationship to grandma while pondering on how their lives have differed. Despite the sense that they’d rather not share a room, they provide a complimentary whole to their imperfect view of the journey. While Benji may be too brash and outgoing for his own good, it’s his insistence that forces David to engage with the world and escape his own shell.
The intimacy of the Kaplan cousins is perfectly contrasted with their environment. As tourists from New York, they are unfamiliar with their new landscape. They call upon an English tour guide to make sure they’re never totally stranded. Eisenberg’s script parallels the internal struggle of the leads with the various sites along the way. In a memorable early scene, Benji encourages the tour group to take a picture in front of a war memorial statue. With everyone mugging for the camera, the only one not playing along is David, whose overanalyzing as he ignores the joyous community on display. He stumbles with everyone’s phone cameras, causing him to be more of a distant observer than active participant.
The viewer is taught to sympathize with David for no other reason than he’s the shy one. Whereas Benji is quick to find fire escapes to get high on hotel roofs, David thinks of his family back home and fawns over the security he’s developed. For someone more akin to itineraries, he becomes the beating heart of A Real Pain to the point that the emotional transcends rather perversely into cold, calculated facts. His lack of impulse causes him to feel alienated from his environment even as he’s staring curiously at architecture. There’s little effort to talk to his peers in the tour group because he worries they’d rather be alone.
For those who prefer to walk around questioning their environment, Benji may be closer to the hero. He’s not above more casual and sometimes vulgar language, often breaking down formalities in the hopes of appealing to strangers as a real person. While one can assume he is the titular “pain,” Eisenberg’s script manages to never fully veer into the obnoxious. He has his flare-ups and sometimes space is needed, but he’s got a keen emotional understanding that makes it clear that something more complicated is going on underneath.
Credit must be given to Culkin in one of his career best performances for managing to make a figure who draws the viewer in from the beginning. His extroversion comes from a genuine place of excitement. The way he barges into conversations may seem abrupt, but it comes from mutual respect. The occasional caustic humor sounds crass on paper, but Culkin’s line deliveries reflect the strength of annunciation. The morbidity comes across as congratulatory or supportive to his talking partner, as if evading some personal pain that’s never explicitly stated. Benji is a character who never fully addresses what his “pain” is. Somewhere in his own immaturity is the most sympathetic arc of all. What the audience comes to realize is that he’s trying to escape a turmoil that exists somewhere in the fray.
It's an emotion not dissimilar from the story’s backdrop. While the tour guide is sure to take them through the various landmarks of the country’s rich history, there is an overwhelming emphasis on World War II. Given that David and Benji are descendants of Jews, there is another personal and unspoken bond to the land. Along with being their grandmother’s homeland, their journey takes them to internment camps. They are reminded of the past with war memorials and gravesites. They perform rituals for those who have come and gone. While very little is directly about their modus operandi, the sense of death overwhelms every plot point for better or worse.
Even with Benji’s snark, it’s not a detail that’s mocked or trivialized. Instead, the subtext suggests that the journey is their way of grieving. Much like their recent loss, the Kaplan cousins are contemplating their place within larger history. What could they hope to achieve that makes them worthy of discussion, of visiting foreign cities and having family members recall their triumphs? Neither one is exceptional. If anything, David is too cautious to take a truly meaningful risk while Benji’s assertiveness often creates setbacks. Both come to feel like outcasts, desperately needing each other to feel less alone. They share an emptiness that lacks a convenient answer. It’s one that makes the macabre easier to process. With all that said, it’s ultimately an attempt to experience happiness.
Poland is a country that has known defeat. The scars of World War II can be seen throughout A Real Pain with murals painted for the communities lost from oppression. The loss within itself is hard to ignore. And yet, with nearly 80 years since the war ended, culture has blossomed and regrown. Generations have come and gone producing their own rich legacies. One can fixate on what is gone, but it’s also important to never forget that time will never stop. Few things will be immortalized from the past, and it’s important to know what’s worth fixating on. While it’s true that emotions are a lot more complicated and interpretive, Eisenberg’s quest to correlate the tactile with the suggestive is a swift achievement made all the more impressive by the film’s brisk 90-minute running time.
At times the film is deceptively simple, often lacking explicit plot details that drive characters forward. If anything, A Real Pain processes everything through an episodic lens, where every stop produces new parables for the leads. Maybe it’s not so much where they go but what they do. It could be a conversation that opens Benji’s world to the tour guide’s need for feedback. It could be how Benji’s romanticization of airports could be as much about the diverse opportunities to meet strangers as it is to engage with the world on a surface level. Everything pushes the characters past their comfort zones, waiting for clarity to strike. Similarly, David’s journey of understanding Benji’s obtuse nature may come with occasional desire to strangle, but reveals a love so deep that it often short-circuits with his anxiety.
Neither character has a grand revelation worthy of the typical road trip comedy narrative. The ending is cyclical, finding everybody back where they started. The question is whether the characters feel enhanced or if they’ll just resort to their prior struggles. Culkin’s performance hides the insecurities so well with a smile that it’s hard to know if he’ll be okay even two hours after the credits roll. Even then, Eisenberg has found a way to suggest that Benji is not alone. While his need to wander airports concerns him, he ultimately lets him do it out of love. He takes the ribbing because it’s a minor inconvenience for a larger connection. These may not be the conventional ways to show affection, but it works for the Kaplans. Nobody else gets it, and that’s why it’s important.
Somewhere buried in the psychological evaluations is a spiritual journey. It’s not of the self-serving variety where grand orchestral scores play from mountaintops. Instead it’s the solitude of self-actualization while staring at history and finally understanding what makes life worth living. The journey could’ve just been about looking at landmarks that hold great interpretive meaning, but it ends up symbolizing something greater. It’s a connection to cultural roots, to a theme of perseverance amid oppression, to the bond of life as a greater concept. There is something affirming about A Real Pain that elevates it above the deceptive simplicity of its framework.
As David and Benji get high on hotel roofs, there is something enthralling. This moment won’t have any meaning later in the story, and yet it’s their way of giving life deeper meaning. If they get caught, they go down together. Wherever their journey takes them, they will have a partner in crime. For as long as they exist in the shadows where nobody’s looking, they’re allowed to be vulnerable, expressing themselves in ways they hide from the larger public. It’s the point where A Real Pain fully earns its title. The pain of holding everything in is unbearable. Having those few moments to tell someone how you truly feel make a world of difference and, more importantly, can start the healing process. Like Poland post-war, it may take some time to get any significant progress, but in time it will be worth the hassle.
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