A Real Pain (Photo – Searchlight)
“The past is a foreign country,” wrote novelist L.P. Hartley back in the 1950’s. And A Real Pain, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieren Culkin, brings that phrase to life.
A Real Pain
Directed by Jesse Eisenberg– 2024
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
The story, about two New York cousins who travel to Poland as a part of a small tour group to visit sites of the Holocaust, is a mixture of comedy, family ties, and abounding ironies as the group travel for a week while Chopin’s sparkling glissandos pursue them. The final stop is the Majdanek concentration camp site.
Grim stuff, perhaps, but the interplay between Eisenberg (who scripted and directed the movie) and Culkin weaves a comedy from this backdrop, though one with a good deal of cringe sprinkled throughout. The Holocaust backdrop makes the modern-day charm of Lublin yield at times to hints of its checkered past. The unspoken hovers in stilled silence.
The movie makes much of the contrast between Eisenberg’s straight-laced family man and Culkin’s shoot-from-the-hip outsider, whose charm and lack of social nuances are at variance. “You light up a room and then shit on everything inside it,” Eisenberg says at one point in frustration.
Culkin’s character, the irrepressible Bengy, is a passive aggressive sort who can’t resist pointing to the elephant in any room, as when he observes the irony of rich Jews riding first class to places where “80 years ago we would have been herded like cattle” or who points out to the pedantic tour guide how he speaks in “factoids” as they go from “touristy thing to touristy thing.”
Yet the movie belongs to Eisenberg, who has always had the ability to speak in rapid-fire sentences and yet make each word seem to count, but here he adds a dollop of pain and uncertainty to his character. His shifting eyes bespeaks of an unsure soul, or as Bengy calls him, “An awesome guy stuck in the body of someone who’s running late.”
The same could almost be said of the movie that raises sticky questions of history and identity but is cautious enough not to force them into easily digestible resolutions. It goes down as easily as the wine the group drinks at dinner after a day of viewing sites were people were slaughtered. The past is a foreign country, vaporous and yet present, as the movie nudges us to recognize.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse.
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