A Real Pain

Watching the evolution of an artist over the years is always fascinating. I first noticed Jesse Eisenberg in Zombieland (although I'd already seen him in The Village), back when I thought of him as a knockoff Michael Cera. In the years since, he's frequently taken on more interesting and daring projects, such as The Double, The Art of Self-Defense, Vivarium, and most recently, Sasquatch Sunset. Of course, my adoration of the man came fairly late: the rest of the world fell in love with him for The Social Network (which, incidentally, holds up way better than you might expect...). Around the same time, I was far more excited to see a movie like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, which serves me well for today, as it was my introduction to Kieran Culkin as more than just "brother to Macaulay". It's the latter performer here who leaves the biggest impression, and whom you'll be hearing about incessantly throughout awards season. Although given how impossibly charming Culkin is, it's hard to be too upset about it. He has some stiff competition, but it wouldn't shock me at all if he gets to add those laurels around his name in a few months time.

The main characters with whom we're taking this tour of pain both scream with Eisenberg's fingerprints as the writer, director, and star. David is the type of character we've seen him confidently and successfully play a hundred times before: anxious, rule following, mousy, lacking confidence, and taking himself very seriously. He's quite good at it, although it's hard to get too excited about him playing a character who can be described as "Ya know...a Jesse Eisenberg type." Benji (Culkin), on the other hand, is in many ways the exact opposite, making him feel like a reflection of Eisenberg's and David's unexpressed id. His personality is big and brash, he wears his heart on his sleeve and experiences wild mood swings, and he's always thinking deeply about the meaning and oppression inherent in the status quo, unable to stop himself from informing everyone in earshot. They're two characters designed to play off each other in a way that allows them both to get at something deeper. They make it okay to get vulnerable and make fools of themselves in the manner needed to get real. They clash, but they can never truly separate, even if time and physical space and emotional circumstance have weathered their bond.

All of this is so, so much up my alley...so why didn't I love it?

That's not to say it's bad. It's been getting a bunch of awards buzz for a reason, sustained enough through recent critics' screenings that its release was delayed by two weeks to push it more firmly into the traditional awards season. It's a quiet movie that's content to be very small, despite the filming taking place entirely on location. And it is properly funny, as much through the writing as through the leads' performances of it.

I think it comes down to restraint.

The script feels very hesitant, allowing its fear of saying the wrong thing prevent it from leaning hard into any of its thoughts, never able to chase them down in a way that felt satisfying. On the one hand, I get it: the subject matter is incredibly sensitive. After all, David and Benji are cousins on a Holocaust tour in Lublin, Poland, where their grandmother lived before escaping to the United States during WWII. One of the last stops on the tour is a visit to Majdanek concentration camp, filmed on site. Powerful as those images are, it feels as if the proximity to such a horrific history may have made them wary of interrogating too many uncomfortable feelings. For how much the movie wants to put forth discomfort, much of it starting from Benji's actions for better or for worse, very little is done with it.

Maybe more than address or resolve or do anything with that discomfort, Eisenberg wants to simply make room for us to live in it, a rarity in a world hyper-focused on shoving all manner of salves our way. There is a value in allowing yourself to feel like crap for a while, to just sit with it without distraction. Recreating it in film form is an admirable goal, but A Real Pain doesn't really achieve that, frequently undercutting its opportunities with a joke or ending the scene or just moving us along. There isn't the demonstration of confidence present in something like Aftersun or Past Lives, where scenes and individual shots take their time and linger way longer than you ever would guess, long past their natural end, which forces you to reckon with what's on screen. Thankfully, Eisenberg does pace himself when they reach Majdanek, sure to make us feel the weight of history while keeping the focus on the very real people whose lives were stolen from them. But that is only a small part of a larger whole, where the effect is largely missing.

The absence is most glaring in the relationship between David and Benji. Despite the affection and love they have for each other, it's clear there's something keeping an arm's length between them. As the tour progresses, and Benji's antics add up while he silently works through the pain of losing his grandmother/best friend, you feel the tension winding itself tighter and tighter. It results in a few late night joints on the roof of their hotel where they open up a bit about what's bugging them. But that's just the key - "a bit". Their conversations start towards something more real and meaningful, something more honest and raw, but then they just...end. One of them will shut down, or the scene will end, or they'll just stop and stare out over the city. They'll say their piece, but cut themselves off. Or else they'll be ready to respond, but we'll watch them bite their tongue, denying us the release of tension. We may have watched the tour group pour out their hearts in despair and humanity as they're overcome by the power of the atrocities and the beauty of Jewish persistence and defiance, but Benji and David can't bring themselves to look at their own dysfunction. Sure, they make little comments that have some impact, but we get the sense that so much remains unexpressed between these two, leaving them in the same place we found them.

Benji and David have different approaches to trauma. Benji wants to charge straight at it, to grapple with it in some way, be it by acknowledging that it's there or making a joke to distract from it or attempting to do something about it. As he shows when they land in first class on the train, his way of avoiding sitting in discomfort is to put a name to it. Meanwhile, David is rather closed off and stoic, more game to stare at the source of their pain, but less willing to discuss what's running through his head, preferring to bear the burden of his thoughts on his own. It may be more considerate of the varying ways others deal with their own pain, as it doesn't impose upon them, but at the cost of opening yourself up for catharsis.

It's quite clear to me this was written and directed by David.