‘A Real Pain’ at IFF Boston: A Fertile Concept Fails to Come to Life

The film “A Real Pain” follows two somewhat estranged Jewish cousins as they tour Poland to pay tribute to their grandmother’s memory and confront the legacy of the Holocaust. Despite the weighty premise, the movie is a comedy that mines the tension between contemporary life and this horrifying history. Jesse Eisenberg takes on the roles of writer, director, producer, and actor, with Kieran Culkin joining him as a leading role. While the film has a strong concept and delivers some genuinely moving and funny moments, “A Real Pain” is weighed down by the off-putting charm it tries to force onto its protagonist.

The movie largely centers on the tension between the two cousins David (Jesse Eisenberg) and Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin). David, now a father with a job selling ads on the internet, is anxious and takes medication for his OCD; on the other hand, he is far more put together on the surface than Benji, a character who still lives in his mother’s basement. Benji has a fun-loving veneer and dazzles the audience with his charisma, whereas David is shy and awkward — a fact that makes him resent Benji. However, the psychological focus of the movie is on Benji’s belated — or nonexistent — development into a responsible adult.

The two join a tour group of four other Jewish characters and visit sights in Poland with their benevolent but possibly naive non-Jewish tour guide, James (Will Sharpe). This is where the antics start. On the first day, the group visits a historic World War II site with statues of Polish soldiers, and Benji asks David to take a photo of him posing with them. David thinks this is disrespectful, but Benji soon gets everyone in the group to pose with him, each person role-playing a different type of army member. A Chopin piece plays in the background of the scene, getting louder and wilder as the reenactment gets more excessive — it’s meant to feel like the characters are dancing. This was the first moment where things felt off. Benji’s behavior sets the attention on himself rather than the monument. The tour group left that monument thinking that Benji was cool, not that the monument was meaningful.

However, maybe a little fun is warranted on emotional trips such as these, right? The next outburst happens as the group is on a train heading to the next site. Benji acts like a different person — he seethes with contempt for the group and lashes out. He questions how they can all feel so comfortable sitting in first class on a train in Poland, given what happened to their not-so-distant ancestors. Benji may have a point, but his attitude is really off-putting. He takes his discomfort as a license to attack others and victimize himself. In actuality, as he points out, the victims were their ancestors. His point also stands in direct contradiction to what he did earlier; by posing with the statues he trivialized that monument, but now he’s upset at the others for trivializing this experience.

Throughout the movie, Benji makes points that do hold some weight, but his tone is always manipulative and self-pitying. Even when he’s calm, his amiability has a false tone — it seems like he’s putting on a facade so he can think that he’s a deeply-feeling, empathetic human being. The movie counts on audiences to be entranced by Benji’s character. If viewers are, they will enjoy the work, but if they aren’t, the film offers little else. David is more consistently amiable than Benji but less interesting. And the other characters, while they occasionally have their moments, are the background to the foreground of David and Benji’s relationship.

Even the subject of the Holocaust feels more like an afterthought than a central element in the film. The point where the historical is awarded the most attention is when the group visits a concentration camp, but the choice to make this sequence silent presumably out of respect — felt more self-indulgent and pretentious than tasteful. The only scene that reaches a level of insight into the complex tension between the perspective of our times and the Holocaust is the long dinner scene with the entire tour group. It is probably the best scene in the movie and one of the few that genuinely confronts the terror of history while simultaneously revealing buried secrets about the main characters in the movie. At the same time, this scene is marred by melodrama; David’s monologue reveals a lot, but the dialogue is a little too close to a soap opera.

As a whole, “A Real Pain” is well put together. The film has a good structure, with the end and beginning tying together in a satisfying way. The score is comprised almost entirely of Chopin pieces, which gives the movie beautiful music — though that isn’t an achievement on the movie’s part, given that all the music has existed for centuries. The cinematographic choices are sometimes quite notable, especially the wide shots; there are several shots of cars driving in the countryside that are especially beautiful. “A Real Pain” also has undeniably funny quips here and there, but maybe not enough of them to justify the work being called a comedy.

The movie also captures many personality types — everyone probably knows people like Benji, or maybe has been in his state. But it’s the movie’s perspective on these types of people that doesn’t sit right. Many characters, including David, express deep concern and annoyance at his behavior. At the same time, the movie exalts him. It aligns itself with his charisma and tries to present his attention-grabbing as beautiful humanity.

“A Real Pain” has its insights, funny moments, and some compelling filmmaking, but the movie chooses to sideline its more promising elements for the sake of focusing on one character — and that character isn’t compelling enough to justify that decision.