A REAL PAIN Review: Dueling Character Studies on Unusual Road Trip

Over more than two decades, Jesse Eisenberg has been a singular onscreen presence, delivering a series of memorable, memorably idiosyncratic performances, including an early standout role in Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical comedy-drama, The Squid and the Whale, in 2005 and an Oscar-nominated turn five years later as Facebook’s controversial co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg, in David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network.

It as only a matter of time before Eisenberg, long interested in writing and directing -- he reportedly wrote his first screenplay in high school -- would turn his talents toward writing and directing films of his own.

Eisenberg’s feature-length debut as writer-director, When You Finish Saving the World, an adaptation of an audio drama he wrote two years earlier, premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival to well-justified accolades. It showed the promise typical of actors-turned-filmmakers: layered, nuanced performances, smart, insightful dialogue, and unobtrusive direction. While the self-centered, entitled characters played by Oscar winner Julianne Moore and Stranger Things vet Finn Wolfhard didn’t qualify as likable, they passed the relatable test easily. His follow-up, a road trip comedy-drama, takes his first film's promise and elevates it to promise fulfilled.  

A Real Pain centers on David (Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin), same-age cousins born weeks apart and practically raised as siblings. Reuniting in an airport several weeks or months after the death of their grandmother, David and Benji are bound for Poland and a Holocaust-themed Heritage tour. One of their grandmother’s last requests, and funded through her last will, the trip to Poland represents a chance for David and Benji to reconcile their differences after years of drifting apart, the result of divergent worldviews, attitudes, and psychological dispositions.

At least initially, Eisenberg’s screenplay emphasizes David and Benji’s contrasting personalities. A husband and father, David prefers the predictable, calculated rhythms of domesticity over Benji’s confrontational, chaotic, conflict-ridden solo lifestyle.

Where David has a steady, if boring gig, Benji doesn’t — or doesn’t appear — to have an income stream beyond whatever he inherited from his grandmother or couch-surfing on the kindness of friends and strangers. Despite their apparent oil-and-vinegar worldviews, there’s also genuine affection and care between the semi-siblings.

Like many road trips in the real and the reel worlds, that mutual affection comes under extreme duress as David and Benji embark on their cross-Atlantic journey, join the tour, meet the other participants, and visit their grandmother’s last known address in Poland. The tour group includes James (Will Sharpe), a Brit academic-turned-tour-guide; Marcia (Jennifer Grey), a recent divorcee;  Diane (Liza Sadovy) and Mark (Daniel Oreskes), a middle-aged couple; and Eloge (Kurt Egyiawan), a Rwandan refugee and convert to Judaism.

Eisenberg's screenplay smartly uses the tour group dynamic to reflect and deepen what we think we know — or what we eventually learn — about David, Benji, their backgrounds, goals, and the future of their turbulent relationship. David’s reluctance, his reliance on politeness, and dependence on norms to navigate social interactions make him a reactive, reactionary character. David can acknowledge Benji’s instinctual empathy, emotional vulnerability, and norm-breaking behavior while also, in David’s words, describing Benji as someone who lights up a room the moment he enters, right before he takes a dump in it.

As the director, Eisenberg gives Culkin the showier, more extroverted role, leaving the quieter, more introspective one for himself. Not unlike his recent, Emmy and Golden Globe Award-winning role on Succession, Culkin takes full advantage of Eisenberg’s trust in his ability to breathe full, well-rounded, sensitive life into the Benji character without turning him into an outright caricature. As the perpetually hesitant, anxiety-prone, introverted David, Eisenberg persuasively plays off against Culkin’s larger-than-reel-life one.

A Real Pain opens and closes inside a New York airport, a liminal space for travelers on both sides of the digital screen, suggesting David and Benji’s individual and collective stories will continue off-screen, spinning off in unpredictable directions.

Review originally published when the film premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. A Real Pain opens Friday, November 1, only in movie theaters, via Searchlight Pictures. Visit the official site for locations and showtimes.