Movie Review: Mercurial Kieran Culkin shines in Jesse Eisenberg’s deftly executed Real Pain

It is part comedy, part tragedy. It’s part road trip saga, part weird couple movie, and part Holocaust movie. What could have gone wrong?

Yes – everything could go wrong. So the first wonder about Real Pain, writer-director Jesse Eisenberg’s beautifully executed film about disparate cousins ​​on a bleak road trip through Poland, is how it manages to strike the most delicate of balances.

It is all the more impressive that he does this while raising intriguing questions about the nature of pain – personal or universal, historical or contemporary. As well as the fact that he delivers an Oscar-worthy performance.

This stunning performance belongs to Kieran Culkin, and what’s impressive is that he doesn’t overpower the rest of the ensemble. It basically shows how Eisenberg, who played one of the less prominent roles, created and developed his film. As for Culkin, well, if you needed proof that his searing, Emmy-winning performance as Roman Roy on The Legacy was no fluke, here it is.

The film, which is only Eisenberg’s second directorial effort, is based on the “Social Network” star’s trip to Poland some 20 years ago. There he found a small house where his aunt lived before the Holocaust uprooted the family. He wondered what his own life would have been like if World War II had not happened.

And that’s one of the many conversations David (Eisenberg) and Benji (Culkin) have as they travel through Poland on a mission to visit the house where their recently deceased grandmother once lived. (Eisenberg used the same house, which tells you how personal the film was to him.)

It’s a poignant yet uncomfortable reunion of cousins ​​who were close as children but go their separate ways in their late 40s. David is a troubled but highly functional type, which actor Eisenberg does admirably; he works in technology and lives with his wife and young son in Brooklyn. As for Benji, he lives upstate and is mostly unmoored or undeveloped. He’s also an explorer of contrasts—the type, as David points out, who can light up a room when he walks in and then fool everyone. The death of their grandmother, with whom Benjy was close, affected his mental health.

The cousins ​​met for the first time at the New York airport. Before they even got through security, Benji gave David a scare by telling him he found some really good weed for the trip. (Don’t worry, he sent it to the hotel.)

In Warsaw, they meet their small tour group and a British guide, James (Will Sharp, “The White Lotus”), an explorer of wartime Poland. Among the travelers are Marsha (Jennifer Gray), a divorcee who moved from Los Angeles to the east and is trying to reconnect with her past; a Midwestern couple (Danielle Oreskes and Lisa Sadovy); and Eloge (Kurt Egiawan), a Rwandan-Canadian convert to Judaism who knows something about the genocide.

In short, Benjy both fascinates and annoys the group—and that bubbly charisma is Culkin’s specialty.

At the war memorial statue, he runs up to strike a playful pose, embarrassing David. But somehow the whole group joins Benji in a childish stunt, and David stays to take pictures.

Then, as the sightseers board the train to Lublin, Benjy suddenly explodes in anger at the group—how ​​can they sit in first-class comfort when their ancestors were herded into cattle cars 80 years ago? He disappears in a lower-class carriage.

And during a visit to a wartime grave, Benjy fiercely reprimands the mild-mannered guide for focusing on statistics and not allowing the group to experience the pure emotion of the moment. (He is not wrong, as the guide later admits.)

Eisenberg said that when conceiving his film, he was struck by a Polish advertisement that promised “Holocaust tours (with lunch)”. All these moments seem very real; such tours are indeed full of awkward (and rather unavoidable) juxtapositions of modern tourist conveniences and historical horrors.

Speaking of horror, by far the most difficult scenes occur when the group visits Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp. There they pass by indescribable sights of gas chambers, ovens and piles of abandoned shoes. Some may initially sigh that Eisenberg is leading us here at all; wisely, he keeps these moments quiet. When Benji breaks down, it’s on the way home—an acknowledgment that such reactions often come later.

At the end, as the cousins ​​anxiously hug goodbye in the same airport where we started, ending a physical and personal journey, it’s hard not to remember the film’s title. Yes, Benji is a “real pain”. But there are layers of pain here.

There’s David’s real pain, the anxiety that keeps him taking pills every day. There’s Benji’s pain, which recently led him to a very dangerous corkscrew.

But Eisenberg seems to be asking how “real” are these types of pain versus the historical pain the film explores in Poland? A place where, as he shows in a striking shot of empty streets that once teemed with life, an entire community was wiped out by the Nazis.

That’s quite a journey for one film. Kudos to Eisenberg and his wonderful colleague for making the journey so thoughtful.

“Real Pain,” a Searchlight Pictures release, received an R rating from the Motion Picture Association “for heavy language and drug use.” Time: 90 min. Three stars out of four.