Writer/director/co-star Jesse Eisenberg and his co-star Kieran Culkin are getting nods and wins for their unique take on the Holocaust tour film. It’s titled A Real Pain, and that’s an apt title. Culkin won an Oscar for his energetic, pain-in-the-butt performance as one of two loving Jewish-American cousins who travel to Poland on a Holocaust tour. Their recently-deceased grandma left money for them to tour Holocaust sites in Warsaw, Lublin, and the concentration camp/death camp Majdanek, and to visit the home she lived in her youth.
Culkin plays Benji, and Benji truly is “a real pain.” He lives his life without social boundaries, he lacks self-control. Benji is loud, a nuisance. He uses inappropriate language, breaks into the lives of folks he hardly knows. He jumps on a train without buying a ticket, grabs food that isn’t his. He mails weed illegally from Binghamton, NY, where he resides, to his hotel in Warsaw.
Cousin David, played by Eisenberg, is reserved, caring of his possibly deranged cousin. David is happily married and has a healthy smart toddler son. He has a steady job; Benji has no real job.
Throughout the film, Benji acts up. His interactions with the tourists in the small Jewish Heritage tour are so pushy, so meddling. Yet the members of the tour seem to accept his odd behavior. At one point in Warsaw, Benji rushes up to a huge war memorial, the 1944 Warsaw Uprising Monument in Krasinski Square, which is the most famous of Holocaust memorials. Suddenly, he runs up to the gigantic statue and strikes a fitting pose. He becomes a part of the monument and aggressively urges the others in the tour to become a living part of that statue.
This isn’t a film that focuses on Holocaust-related sites or teaches the extermination of six million Jews. Sure, a viewer who has little knowledge of these horrific events will learn something, but A Real Pain, in essence, is a character study. Benji is the focal point of this film. He itrespasses, illegally smokes weed, curses and insults people. “Money is like f—king heroin for boring people.” He says this to people who seem to have some money. Yet, Benji has a love of those around him, and they seem to take to him and his annoying ways.
The story takes us through only a few days. If you are searching for an in-depth, onscreen tour, you will get fragments. Yes, you will see the gas chambers at Majdanek, but you may not be emotionally splintered by seeing them so briefly and without heavy music playing. This movie doesn’t focus on the cruelty and horror of the Holocaust. Instead, the outstanding part of this motion picture is the complexity of Benji’s character. Is he a total loser, a rude son of a bitch, a social misfit? Or is he loving and needy? The reaction of the tour group towards him as they part company is telling.
This film was made as an international coproduction between Poland and the United States. Other interesting credits are Emma Stone as a producer, and Jennifer Grey as a New York City-based divorcee who is a member of the tour.
A Real Pain is Eisenberg’s second feature film as writer/director. His previous film was called When You Finish Saving the World, from 2022, starring Julianne Moore. That movie failed to impress many critics or viewers. While A Real Pain may not electrify audiences, it should capture and hold their attention, and most of all have them reflect upon Benji, one of the best written screen characters of the past few years.
