Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain” is a buddy dramedy set against a tour of Holocaust sites in Poland. If that scenario sticks in your throat, that’s the point. It is an uncomfortable film, but not a callous one. Eisenberg wants you to contemplate the various incompatible elements here because what is the Holocaust compatible with, exactly? The Holocaust is usually politely cordoned off to its own genre, while Eisenberg unleashes it against the tides of everyday life.
David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins in early middle age who are close like brothers but who have drifted. Benji isn’t shy about assigning blame for that drift: David hasn’t come to visit him in months, it hurts him, and he reminds David of this fact constantly, directly and indirectly. In fact, everything that Benji does over the course of this film could be broadly explained as a rebuke of David’s distraction. Anyway, they take a trip to Warsaw to go on a heritage tour together, visiting sites of Jewish resistance to the Nazis that culminate in a trip to a concentration camp.
Eisenberg has packed “A Real Pain” with a bold series of metaphors. David and Benji’s grief over their grandmother, and another near-tragedy that’s revealed later on, is rhymed with Jewish agony over the Holocaust. Benji is a volatile man-child who weaponizes his considerable empathy, wanting the tour group to experience grief his way. We’ve experienced this sort of hostility in real life: hipster aggression that the wielder passes off as selflessness, but Benji is the most accurate embodiment of it that I’ve ever seen in a movie. Culkin is so extraordinary that you stop thinking of the performance and regard him simply as Benji.
“A Real Pain” has been conceived as a showcase for Culkin. Eisenberg’s greatest accomplishment as writer-director here is his refusal to put Benji into a pat therapeutic box. Benji’s pain isn’t whisked away so that audiences can leave for dinner feeling better. As obnoxious as Benji is, he’s charismatic, and most of the tour group responds to him when he’s throwing a tantrum. They respect his honesty, his willingness to fillet himself, and Eisenberg and Culkin understand that Benji’s charisma, madness, and selfishness all spring from the same under-utilized creative furnace.
The other members of the tour group—including the leader (Will Sharpe), a divorcee (Jennifer Grey), and a man who has converted to Judaism after surviving modern genocide (Kurt Egyiawan)—respond in part to Benji’s very willingness to be unlikable. They take it as a breath of fresh air in a culture dominated by the impersonal good manners in which David specializes. David is more reasonable and accommodating than Benji, and as such anonymous. He’s an everyman worn down to the nub by the responsibilities of job and family.
Eisenberg has deliberately created a movie in which he’s upstaged thoroughly by his co-star, and there’s pain in that irony too, which he plays beautifully. He may specialize in closed-off nerds, but, in his way, Eisenberg is every bit as intuitive as Culkin. And the pain keeps the film from getting too cute. “A Real Pain” isn’t a buddy movie in the typical frivolous way, it’s meant to be unresolved and taken seriously.
All this pain and good acting, and yet “A Real Pain” feels thin. As a writer and actor, Eisenberg has imagination and cunning. As a director, he’s still too polished for my tastes. “A Real Pain” feels tidy and measured, hemmed in. I’ve been to Warsaw, and have even been on one of these tours, and Eisenberg doesn’t capture the extravagant nuances of a city that’s beautiful yet haunted by atrocity. He reduces the city to postcard sets for the actors to walk in and out of while delivering lines. The film has a flat visual pattern in the mode of network TV shows. Eisenberg has only directed a few times though. He has considerable potential.
Another film released earlier in the year has a similar plot as “A Real Pain,” Julia von Heinz’s “Treasure,” which follows a father (Stephen Fry) and adult daughter (Lena Dunham), who visit Poland to reckon with his childhood home. He survived the Holocaust, and she feels his inability to face up to it has stunted their relationship. “Treasure” is a heavier than “A Real Pain,” making its points laboriously, but von Heinz is more alive to Poland than Eisenberg. “A Real Pain” is destined to get more attention, and in truth it’s more engaging than “Treasure,” a slow, repetitive movie that nevertheless lingers. Dunham is as good in her own quiet, resigned register as Culkin. No longer having to live up to media hype, Dunham has become a terrific actress.
The flashiest of all the films under consideration here this week, and the least fruitful by a wide margin, is Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ “Heretic.” It’s an A24 release, and it is clear by now that the company has a taste for horror films that are composed of one part cool high-concept gimmick, one part earnest term paper, and two parts nothing. You pay to see Hugh Grant cast against type as the mastermind of a slasher movie, who lectures a couple of young Mormon women on the hypocrisies of organized religion. And that’s what Beck and Woods have delivered: sort of.
Grant is good, as he always is when he’s allowed to weaponize the dithering about that, played without irony, made him a star in the 1990s. He takes palpable pleasure in attacking Beck and Woods’ windy monologues, which want to be the kind of coiled suspense-by-talking lectures that Quentin Tarantino routinely brings off. But the lectures as written aren’t interesting or blasphemous. As atheism goes, this is day-one stuff, reminding us that religion is—gasp!—created by humans. “Heretic” would have more punch if the faith of the Mormon sisters (Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East) was shaken. It’s not, and so they are reduced to passive observers of Grant’s acting.
What keeps us awake in the film’s first half is the, um, faith, that Grant’s house of horrors will be revealed to cleverly embody his sadistic will to test the women’s belief. In other words, we want booby traps that literalize the war between atheism and theism. When Grant invites his guests to pick between two doors marked “Belief” and “Disbelief,” your hopes may be piqued. If I may be permitted a mild spoiler in the service of saving you time and ticket money, both doors lead to another boring room and more boring sermonizing. “Heretic” is a tease, a paltry non-event.
This movie and another overhyped A24 dud from earlier this year, “Civil War,” are both designed to suggest that they are playing with cultural fire, connecting to the white-hot hatred separating the right from the left, at least as media chooses to represent them. I think they only embody how clueless the media, including many filmmakers, are in dramatizing how people live with their ideologies. Last week’s election embodied that cluelessness as well. We don’t know each other, and the choose your own reality that’s now possible via left and right-wing social media has only widened the gulf. One of the minor side effects of that gulf is more crummy culture war bait from A24.
“A Real Pain” and “Heretic” are now in theaters everywhere. “Treasure” is streaming on Paramount + and available to rent at Amazon, etc.
