(courtesy IMP Awards)
Much as we like to think we are up and close and personal with real life, that we are intimately and bruisingly acquainted with the slings and arrows of grave fortune, we are, for the greater part protected and inured to the horrors that simply being alive can visit on us.
It may not necessarily be a universal truth, but it’s one well recognised in A Real Pain, written and directed with rich, nuanced empathy and great humour by Jesse Eisenberg who goes deep diving into the darkest and lightest parts of a human condition in a film set against the cataclysmic residual horrors of the Jewish experience.
Essentially a road movie, but one with intense thoughtfulness accompanying the expected levity, A Real Pain features Eisenberg as straight-laced digital ad salesperson, David Kaplan, married with a lovely wife and cute-as-a-button toddler in New York City who goes on what older member of their later tour group describes as a “Holocaust tour” of Poland.
He is joined by his more charming but anarchic cousin, Benjamin “Benji” Kaplan (Kieran Culkin, who well deserves his slew of recent awards including Best Supporting Actor at the recent Academy Awards for his performance) who lives in his mother’s basement, smokes a lot of weed and who enjoys shit-stirring the point to an almost uncomfortable degree.
They are polar opposites in many ways, but they have a closeness and deep love for each other, formed in childhood, partly the result of being born three weeks apart to brothers, but also of spending huge amounts of time together, often all-nighters where the more nervy Benji would pace the city until David fell asleep on a park bench somewhere.
The idea of going to Poland to acquaint themselves with their Polish Jewish roots is that of their just-passed grandmother, a survivor of the concentration camps who through a “thousand miracles” emerged alive from the horrors of the Holocaust to forge a new and emotionally honest life in America.
She was close to both of her grandsons but especially to Benji who admits at one point that his grandmother was the only person who could rein in his more excessive moments, of which there are a great many as A Real Pain unfolds in a meditatively quiet and yet often painfully intense way.
At his best Benji is innately likeable, the type of charming extrovert who brings people into his orbit with consumate, unself-conscious ease and who builds connections in a way that a more buttoned-down David can’t even conceive of doing.
But he has also has a burning, driving need to be heard, to dominate situations and he’s unable to resist the almost instantaneous impulse to ride on in, verbals blazing and to say the sorts of things that most of us would blanch at, too afraid to be seen as rude or impolitik and just plan boorish.
Somehow, though he gets away with it, and while he tests David’s patience, and the group think of him as “tormented” and broken, everyone, by the end of the tour, embraces him warmly and with a real sense of loss that they won’t see him again.
It’s astonishing to witness really because there are moments in A Real Pain which are awkward as hell to watch and enormously uncomfortable, but somehow Benji emerges from these cringeworthy moments unaffected and unspurned – perhaps the truth really does set you free?
Whatever the source of his magnetic charm, Benji is troubled and quite lonely and lost in life for all his instant, effervescent connectivity, and it’s to Culkin’s immense credit that Benji emerges as an accessible, emottionally relatable real person than an annoying caricature.
There is a real vulnerability to Benji, partly Culkin’s superlatively arresting performance but partly Eisenberg’s screenplay which balances some real pain, both existential and historical, with moments of quite buoyant levity, sparkling humour and life.
While A Real Pain is styled in the trailer as a comedic road trip, there’s a far deeper pulse running through it.
Against the backdrop of sobering visits to concentration camps and memorials, all of which move the group to varyingly intense degrees, David and Benji are working what it means to be once close cousins who have drifted apart and whether they even fit together well anymore.
Benji, with no relationship, no job and no firm direction in life, scorns David’s loss of spontaneity and vivacity while David despairs at times of how Benji is going to survive his anarchically unpredictable path through life and his capacity to repel and attract people almost simultaneously.
As they grapple with the weight of their family’s past and their own shared experience as descendants of a woman who saw the worst humanity could do and lived to defy it with a good life well lived, they have to work out what they do going forward and how they fit into each other’s lives.
There’s no easy answer of course and A Real Pain is too grounded and honest a film to pretend there is, with even the ending reaching some accommodation but not the gidduly seamless kind so beloved of most Hollywood films.
A Real Pain is far more rooted in the flaws and imperfections of life, and how even when we love someone and they deeply matter to us, that we can still lose out way, with each other and with the world at large.
It would be nice to think you can wave a magic wand and everything is fixed, but as their tour demonstrates on a macro level, and they experience on a stutteringly micro level full of closeness and quite manifestly not, life rarely makes things that easy not does it tie everything with a neatly formed bow.
At its end, A Real Pain is one of those superbly real films that reconnects you with raw, difficult humanity, with the pain we all experience, and the way we do our best to innoculate ourselves against it; Benji and David have chosen wholly different ways to numb the pain, and while it would be tempting to say one trumps the other, the truth it’s not that easy or clearcut and perhaps we all have to make our peace with the figurative (and sometimes real) bloodied loose ends of life.
INTERVIEW
OSCAR MOMENT