A Real Pain (2024) *****

 

What is real pain? How do you measure suffering? How does one person's trauma measure up against another's. These are the questions posed by Jesse Eisenberg's “A Real Pain.”

Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play David and Benji, cousins who go on a tour of Poland to honor their late, Jewish grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. David is reserved and anxious, his OCD barely controlled by medications. Benji is outgoing and open, but prone to sudden, dark moods. Obviously a rapid-cycling Bipolar, he alternately charms and confounds the other members of their tour group. David tries to wrangle Benji's moods while the two attempt to make some kind of connection with their grandmother's experience from within the confines of a comfortable, well-fed, guided tour.

As the story goes, Eisenberg was trying to write a road trip movie, but hitting a road block. When he saw an ad for an “Auschwitz Tour – with Lunch,” everything clicked into place. The pairing of a tour of a concentration camp with something as mundane as a free lunch inspired him to write about the inherent contradiction of trying to understand suffering from a place of comfort.

Of course, David and Benji are not completely comfortable. Despite their middle-class upbringings, they are both affected by mental illness. David wrestles with this; how the annealing process of the Holocaust should have produced a people so resilient that nothing bothers them. Yet, two generations later, despite never missing a meal or sleeping out in the rain, his cousin is so debilitated by depression that he lives in his mother's basement.

Sounds like a barrel of laughs, right? Well, surprise! It is! For a movie that deals with such heavy material, “A Real Pain” is shot through with intelligent humor. The acting is excellent, both from Eisenberg and Culkin and from the excellent supporting cast, which includes Jennifer Grey. Kieran Culkin earned himself an Oscar nod for Best Supporting Actor, and Jesse Eisenberg's script is nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and for my money he should have been nominated for Best Director, as well. This is clearly one of the best films of 2024, and they need to be making more movies like this one.

5 stars out of 5