Film Title:  A Real Pain

2024, Directed by Jesse Eisenberg Cast: Jesse Eisenberg as David; Kieran Culkin, Golden Globe winner for his characterization of Benji.

Also includes Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes.

Spoiler alert. But it doesn’t matter – this review may help.

A good reader is a re-reader, says author and teacher Vladimir Nabokov in his “Lectures on Literature.” I believe the same goes for film. In anticipation of writing a few notes on the movie “A Real Pain” I watched it a second time at home – slowly. I took notes and was able to pause, rewind, and revisit scenes multiple times. A second viewing gave me the ability to hear the tender plaintive piano music of Polish composer Frederic Chopin, which gently holds us throughout the film – mirroring the energy and mood of the story.

I loved the film the first time. But the second slow time gut-punched me with dialogue and nuance I originally missed while gulping down the plot. Wikipedia calls it a buddy comedy-drama. Are they kidding? I mean, yes…but no. This is a story about pain and love and loss and the unending human struggle. And a sad story about love between cousins who were like brothers and are now quite different and apart. And a yearn- ing for how things used to be.

It is dead wrong to think this is a holocaust film or, as one reviewer quipped, a holocaust comedy. Yes, there is a tour of the Majdanek concentration camp outside of Lublin, Poland. Yes, there is a visit to a Jewish cemetery and poignant views of the Jewish neighborhoods that were once so vibrant with Yiddish conversation, commerce, theatre, poetry, and music. But that is a backdrop – a heartbreaking backdrop to the melody of the love and loss story of two cousins who have been bequeathed a visit to Poland to visit the childhood home of their grandmother, Dory.

David and Benji had been very close as children. That is gone now and Da- vid, a nervous, anxious rule follower – successful in outward appearance with career and family – has found it very difficult to be around the chaotic, rebellious, angry, and often miserable yet charming, generous, and loving Benji. He loves him but can no longer tolerate the craziness. Benji deeply misses the closeness and the purpose in life he used to have protecting and soothing David. Their childhood love fuels the conflict and the plot.

Benji is hard to describe. He can immediately connect to people and not only charm them but get to their core and bond at a deep emotional level. David’s social skills are much weaker, and he is often awkward and alone. As charming as Benji is, he can turn on those same people in a second with aggression, anger, mocking, and generally horrible alienating behavior. The two moods seem to be tied together push- ing and pulling inside of him.

Clearly Benji is damaged in some fundamental way. We don’t get a good understanding of why, and I wouldn’t presume to diagnose. But the film questions whether their collective anxiety and misery is generational trauma, individual psychological differences, and/or simply the human condition.

You come to learn just how lost and suffering Benji is. He has recently lost his beloved grandmother (“She was the only person that stuck with me – every- one else left me when I needed them most”), and he lost David a long time ago. He feels abandoned by David and tells the tour people how it used to be. How important he used to be in David’s life. Benji tells the group, “This is the guy I used to have all to myself. David cried for a week at overnight camp, and I held him in my arms soothing him with tales of his sweet mother.” “What happened to you David? You used to cry all the time.” David’s retort, “How is crying all the time a good thing?” David, on the other hand, has man- aged to corral his anxiety and pull a life together, partly by distancing himself from the difficult Benji. We watch as Benji becomes increasingly more difficult, blaming David for his own lateness, berating David for being a wimp back in the day and now. Daring David – almost forcing him – to hide on the train without a ticket and to break through doors that say Don’t Enter. It’s torture for David, yet exhilarating too. It always was.

Benji becomes almost impossible to be around. He is A Real Pain. Yet at the same time, through his loud and unbearable truth telling, he enriches everyone’s experience on the tour. On the train to the camp, he completely freaks out and lambasts everyone for calmly eating fancy food and happily sitting in first class on the very same train tracks where their ancestors were thrown onto the trains almost naked, sick, and miserable. The problem with Benji is that he doesn’t just pose the question. He makes a huge scene shaming everyone and dramatically throws himself into third class. But it isn’t a performance. He is a truth teller, and he can barely stand what he sees as the complacency of the others who don’t have his deep feelings. Admirable in so many ways – but destructive. He loses people but has no control over his behavior.

In a pivotal scene in a restaurant, the cousins talk about their grandmother, Dory, who always said she survived the Holocaust due to "a thousand miracles." Benji breaks down with grief, lashes out at everyone, and walks out of the restaurant loudly and repeatedly burping so the whole restaurant can hear. It’s David’s turn to break down. In what should have been an award- winning scene, David lets loose when a tour member says, “He’s clearly in pain.” David whips, “Isn’t everybody in pain? Look where our families came from – isn’t everybody wrought??”

Another tour colleague says, “Well YOU seem ok David.” David sobs, “I’m NOT! I take pills for obsessive compulsive disorder, I jog, I meditate. I move forward because I know my pain is not exceptional. I don’t want to burden everybody with it (like Benji).

David continues sobbing, “I am exhausted by Benji. I love him I hate him I want to kill him I want to BE him. He is so fucking cool and doesn’t give a shit what people think.”

He then reveals to the group that Benji is only six months away from having attempted suicide. David is livid with grief and anger at the thought. “How did the product of a thousand miracles overdose on a bottle of sleep- ing pills. (crying) I don’t want to lose him.”

The next day, alone with Benji, David tells him that he doesn’t want to lose him. He compares himself to Benji. “Do you see how people love you? When you walk into a room? I would give anything to know what that feels like. To have charm. You light up a room, and then you shit on everything inside it.”

In the last scene we see the cousins in the New York airport at the end of their odyssey. They cling to each other. David leaves and reunites with his wife and child. Benji sits down in the crowd- ed airport alone. Isolated in his pain.

The future for them is questionable.

Watch this movie…Twice.