Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: a real pain, jesse eisenberg, Kieran Culkin

A Real Pain Is Excruciatingly Tense And Powerful {Review}

A Real Pain is painfully tense and hard to watch in some parts, in all the best ways. A shoo-in come awards season.

A Real Pain is a layered title. Jessie Eisenberg returns to the director's chair for one of the year's most deeply personal films. Nobody will have a problem connecting to this story on multiple levels, from the painful scenes set around a pilgrimage many Jews have gone on, to the family drama that has the kind of crushing weight behind it that makes it hard to breathe, there is something here to depress anyone. That is a huge compliment, as Eisenberg's script is also one about connection and tolerance, something that we all could use a bit more of these days.

A Real Pain Will Win One Oscar

David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are traveling abroad on a tour of Poland to honor their deceased grandmother. As they travel along, old wounds are laid bare, and tensions rise the deeper they go into their family history. The script is a tight, 90-minute rumination on how family history, trauma, and just the struggle of life take a toll on us in different ways. What horrors that we feel daily can come close to what our ancestors went through? Do our struggles even matter in the grand scheme of things when set against a backdrop of such terrible suffering? A Real Pain is felt as the film plays out, as the mind does drift a bit thinking about these questions, though not in a bad way; Eisenberg set it up to be this way because he is asking himself the same things.

His character desperately wants to be Benji in many ways but is unwilling to take on the bad parts of what mixes into Benji's bravado and selflessness. And only one actor today could play that role in such a way, and that is Culkin, a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Benji, and he should win. On the surface, he seems to be playing an extension of his Succession character that he spent years crafting, and the further we go into the screenplay, he flips it around and oozes pain and agony. There is a scene in the third act at a dinner table where the true nature of Benji's pain is revealed, which is one of the most torturing and tense scenes in a film this year. As each line comes out of David's mouth with vitriol and venom you are not expecting, you cower in your seat, praying that Benji stays away from the table long enough that he does not overhear. Tears were flowing freely and often afterward, both onscreen and off.

A Real Pain has an ambiguous ending, as it should. Pain never ends; you either push it down and let it out in bursts like David, or you don't let it dictate your life, and people see it behind your eyes, like Benji. One hopes we can try for something more, but we don't. We are the main characters in our own lives, and while nothing compares to the pain of the past, sometimes, when confronted by it, you feel nothing. Not until your pain manifests over something that you are dealing with personally does it become overwhelming and troubling. May we all have someone like Benji in our lives, and may we all figure out someday how to manage our issues. Until then, films like this will be there to help us.

A Real Pain

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Review by Jeremy Konrad

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9/10

A Real Pain is painfully tense and hard to watch in some parts, in all the best ways. One of the best scripts of the year, and a shoo-in come awards season.

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