A Real Pain – funny and moving with Culkin excellent

Jesse Eisenberg’s film about mismatched Jewish-American cousins taking an organised Holocaust trip across Poland in honour of their recently-deceased grandmother, who had survived the camps, manages to be irreverent, funny and profoundly moving.

Benjie is a boisterous drifter with strong opinions and no filter. David is a neurotic who works hard selling online ads, loves being with his wife and their young son, and is already homesick on their flight from New York.

Their tour guide is James, while their fellow visitors are recently divorced Marcia, Elogue, who survived the Rwandan genocide and later converted to Judaism, and Mark and Diane from Ohio, who are recently retired.

From the start of their tour, Benji acts up, persuading the group to pose ridiculously in front of the Warsaw Uprising Monument for photographs, taken on their phones by the embarrassed David.

The next day, on a train journey to Lublin, he explodes angrily that nobody else seems to have noticed the incongruity of their being Jewish, in a first-class carriage, traveling through former Nazi-occupied Poland.

Is the title of A Real Pain a reference to Benji or more about the pain of personal struggle, of personal grief, of collective trauma and of survivor guilt? Eisenberg – who also stars in the film – made it in part about the last of those, in relation to his own experiencing of being a “third-generation survivor”, when some of his ancestors died in the camps.

There’s also nods to the problems of trauma tourism.

It’s also a story about the migrant experience – not only of those Jewish people whose ancestors reached the US, but also of Elogue and James, who is a Northern English philosemite of Asian extraction.

Given the comedic nature of elements here, it’s a sensitive, touching and thought-provoking film.

Cinematographer Michał Dymek deliberately moved away from any sort of stereotypical Western idea of Warsaw being post-Soviet era gloomy. The soundtrack is almost entirely piano music by Polish virtuoso Chopin, played by classical pianist Tzvi Erez.

Eisenberg is excellent as the socially-insecure David, but it’s Oscar-winning Kieran Culkin who steals the show as Benji – not only in his manic moments, but also in revealing the pain that he lives with.

Will Sharpe as James is very good, but generally speaking the rest of the cast don’t really get enough screen time to make a huge impact, with the exception (just about) of Kurt Egyiawan as Elogue and Jennifer Grey as Marcia.

Now available to stream and comes in at a tight 90 minutes.