Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin create a masterpiece about a friend

You probably know someone like David: he is in his early 40s, has a steady job (selling ads on the Internet), loves his wife and young son. He is medicated but still plagued by anxiety, somehow seems both very observant and constantly distracted. Takes the responsibility of adult life seriously. very seriously. Maybe you are related to this person. Maybe you are that person.

And you almost certainly know someone like Benji: he’s also in his early 40s, but no one seems to have told him he’s grown up. The type of person who can’t help but speak his mind, can’t help but give off a vibe of the life of the party, can’t help but be the lovable dork within a 50 mile radius. Refuses to bow to all that corporate sponsored “success” propaganda. He is very familiar with his mother’s basement. On the plus side, he knows where to get some really great weed upstate.

These are two archetypes — an ant-grasshopper dynamic duo that would make Aesop clap his hands slowly — writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg represents us in real pain a road movie that steps far enough off the beaten track to stand out from a million other misfit companion stories. It’s funny, given that the bulk of this unusual drama about reconciliation, history, the legacy of tragedy and that old chestnut about the past never dying, etc., takes place during one of those guided group tours and is planned to the millisecond. David would appreciate the irony with a wry smile. Benjy would just punch you in the arm and tell you to live longer for the moment before making his way to the roof of the hotel and lighting up a joint.

Unsurprisingly, it was David (Eisenberg) who booked this trip for him and Benji (Kieran Culkin). These two cousins ​​were once extremely close. David now has a family and a career in Brooklyn, while Benji is just enjoying life in Bennington, New York. The latter wasn’t particularly moored after their grandmother Dory died, as she was one of the few people he felt really cared about him. So his cousin organized a trip to Poland to honor her, which would bring the two back to Nana’s homeland, culminating in a visit to the home where she grew up. This is the perfect chance for these somewhat estranged relatives to spend quality time together again.

Time, of course, only exacerbated the differences between the two men, and once they joined a tour group led by a British scientist (White LotusWill Sharpe), who never met a footnote to the regional Jewish experience he didn’t like, the gap between the buttoned-up David and the carefree Benji becomes much more apparent. Real pain can double as a de facto travelogue of a long-lost version of Poland, in which the world of pre-ghettoized Jewish quarters was laid bare but not forgotten, as well as a checklist of its tributes and markers of mass atrocities in the mid-20th century. But in fact, it focuses on a much more personal story that was not shaped by the forcibly abandoned Motherland, but was overshadowed by it. Both cousins ​​connect with their roots in unexpected ways, even as they acknowledge an alternate history in which they both grew up in Poland (“where we have long beards and can’t talk to women”) that seems a little off-putting. It’s their connection to each other that seems more like ancient history to them now, especially when it comes to processing the importance of it all.

For David, this means a respectful sense of aloofness, that is, his usual one modus operandi. For Benjy, well… let’s just say he is a lot Eisenberg lavishly gifted his co-star with the kind of crazed I.D. role most actors could only dream of, and Culkin rewards his director/cast-mate with the best, funniest, most comical, heart-wrenching performance of his career — and yes, we’re counting Roman Roy Succession. His Benji, like a bundle of pure, undiluted charisma, joyfully asks about the lives of strangers and leads his fellow tourists to a photo shoot in front of the Warsaw Uprising monument. (David, of course, is left to take pictures on everyone’s phones.) It’s this inner light that emanates from him that makes the occasional storm clouds of anger and barrage of crude, heated comments excusable, if not entirely acceptable. The actor plays him both as an unfiltered fool and as an adorable rug-peeing puppy. “I love him, I hate him, I want to kill him, I want to be him,” Eisenberg’s character says at one point, and thanks to Culkin, you fully understand each of those impulses.

Culkin’s Zen-stoner take on a free spirit who’s also a broken spirit—a casually spilled bit of information hints at a backstory that suggests the film’s title is deserved—would be enough to recommend it. But Eisenberg’s second appearance behind the camera also establishes him as a true director. His first film, When you’re done saving the world (2022), resembled the work of a person who was cautiously groping for an art form. This sophomore writer-director is proof that someone has an eye, an ear, and a voice. There is a sense of moving the camera just enough to emphasize detail and framing the sequence in a way that suggests taking advantage of background, symmetry and/or space without seeming ostentatious. That his work directing the film’s ensemble, which also includes Jennifer Grey, House of the DragonKurt Egiavan, David Oreskes, and Lisa Sadovy complementing the semi-light, semi-heavy tone of the film comes as no shock. That Eisenberg is savvy enough to abruptly end the series at the Majdanek concentration camp with a sudden sigh and then ending with silent sobs is not to be expected.

Real pain ends in the same frame it begins with, a traveler in an airport lost in thought as the world moves around him. The second time is as mysterious as the first, and yet now we know these two cousins ​​so well—and have heard their arguments and accusations, seen how incompatible they are, witnessed how their love for each other cannot close the gap between them. their life choices—what we read in this view is huge. These two have just covered hundreds of miles together, but healing can only be measured in inches. However, what Eisenberg achieves here is immeasurable. This is the real deal.