By Meadow Wattret, Film and TV Co-Deputy Editor
It’s 2am in the middle of term two and I can’t sleep because of my three younger brothers. Not because they’re screaming at video games, or because I’m still seething after a text-fight where I declared they were ‘the worst’. I’m wondering where they are, what they’re doing, and how everything’s going. Me and mine don’t talk all that often (mostly because they ignore my texts), and even when we do, the quality time is spent slinging verbal assaults until someone storms off. As the title to Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial and screenwriting debut A Real Pain (2024) suggests: families are agony. But they’re also very funny - quite often they’re the funniest people I know. I hate them, and then I love them, and sometimes I can’t sleep because I’m worried about them. It’s almost like they’re a ginormous nightmare because I care so much. I wonder if my relationship with my brothers, in all its complex and irregular and immature glory, will survive adulthood – when our arguments stop revolving around screaming and video games and we lead different, serious lives.
These happen to be the stakes driving main characters and cousins David and Benji to tour through Poland, honour their Jewish roots and visit their Grandmother’s house. The two want to spend time together for the first time in what seems to be a while. David, an anxious, self-conscious, sweet family man, and Benji, a people-person with infectious joie de vivre and too much impulsivity, clearly care for each other in spades.
We first see them picking up their stuff in the airport, a sort of homebase for the film as we don’t know much about their lives outside of those walls or their trip. They volley back and forth, Benji proposes a wild night, and David twitches nervously in that classic ‘Eisenberg’ way. Amid their chatter it’s implied that the two have (literal and figurative) baggage now – two very different adult lives - wearing down their previously tight-knit, childish bond. What’s left is this fragile but loving, if occasionally awkward, chumminess, developed through the beautifully quiet naturalism of Eisenberg’s direction and a whip-smart script. Through his authentic choices, we get a glimpse of what their relationship used to look like, and a 360-degree view of its new form.
Benji’s little moments speak volumes: we are shown rather than told that his life is not just different from David’s, but harder - more displaced. I thought this was the film’s first hurdle and I feared it would fall, or turn an authentic character-driven story into some underdog narrative. I didn’t want Benji’s hardships specified, David’s struggles sidelined, or their difficult relationship over-simplified. But in an approach that attests to a near-perfect script, Eisenberg holds up a magnifying glass to the duo equally. We see that for all they don’t share in personality or priorities, they share in otherness. Or maybe a dissatisfaction with who they are: where Benji’s shows itself in his hedonism, David’s vice is regularly taking an undisclosed mental health medication. Eisenberg and Culkin’s chemistry works because they are equally empathetic for different reasons; two sides of the same coin.
Just as we see fragments of the bigger picture beyond the trip, we’re back to being unaware of David and Benji outside of, well, David and Benji’s trip to Poland. Some might find this keeps audiences at a frustrating distance - I felt it brought us closer. The setting lets us see who the cousins really are without getting bogged down in wider exposition. Plus, nothing reveals complex characters like the stress of a family holiday.
Every second we spend with the cousins is spent decorating their respective awkwardness and charm, fear and self-destruction. And just as Benji’s impenetrable warmth is tickling you to the point you sort of wish the film was only about him, the direction encourages you to re-evaluate. Up-close shots of David standing on the sidelines while Benji wizzes his way to the heart of each member in their tourist group really touched me. They capture his longing to be a social butterfly – and the hurt of seeing your family be best at the things you’re worst at. Family is a contract of love that you can’t negotiate. You get what you’re given, and David’s experiences with this are never belittled or ignored as they easily could’ve been by Culkin’s film-stealing performance. Eisenberg broke my heart playing such an unusually sensitive character, and thoughtfully validated the struggle to understand our loved ones.
To address the elephant in the room: if Kieran Culkin wins the Oscar for best supporting actor, all will be right in the world. I for one will be satiated. Benji’s unfair and mean and kind of a really bad family member, but he never appears despicable, and you always want to let him off just this once. This is partly thanks to Eisenberg’s empathetic writing. More credit is due, I think, for never giving us a resolution after Benji offloads, and letting his pain linger realistically over scenes following. But Culkin really fizzes as both as the life of the party and the spiralling lost cause. As he leapt between infectiously sociable and dangerously isolated I threw myself with him; hating him, then pitying him, even wishing I could be him. I shed several tears. Granted it’s not hard for a film to make me cry, but with absolutely every flex of his acting muscles Culkin captured a new tear-jerking colour of the human rainbow. To any ordinary actor Benji’s eruption scenes are the character’s climactic big moment. To Culkin, they’re the tip of a very complex iceberg. Mastering the hurt person hurting people deserves awards, and Culkin does this effortlessly.
So, if you’re a character-led dramedy superfan like myself, this film is the super bowl. The spurts of funny, natural dialogue, the well-timed knowing looks and pauses, the blow-ups, the quiet moments - it’s all perfectly bittersweet. The side characters added a nice kick of nostalgia, particularly Jennifer Grey’s Marcia, and Will Sharpe’s bumbling British tour guide James. They’re fleshed out just enough to be whole but are still left relatively enigmatic, creating a feeling exactly like spending time with people on Holiday for a day or two and never seeing them again. It is as if the camera itself is a tourist; squeezing in as many people, places and things as possible over a short hour and a half. But apart from the quick shots of beautiful architecture and the heavier exploration of a concentration camp, the camera-tourist is not interested in capturing its surroundings so much as capturing the humanity within them.
Families are a nightmare. Through beautiful acting, attentive direction and perfect writing, A Real Pain tries to figure out why – and I think it hits the nail on the head. David’s perspective and Benji’s struggle feel close to home because they remind me of how painful it is to love someone unconditionally when you don’t choose who that someone is. They remind me that loneliness is most painful when you’re surrounded by people who love you. They remind me to stop starting fights with my family and start more conversations, even when they’re ‘the worst’.
Have you seen A Real Pain?
