In 2022, when Jesse Eisenberg premiered his directorial debut, When You Finish Saving the World, it resulted in a wet thud. It was… not good. Nothing in the movie felt earned, the characters only behaved the way Eisenberg wanted them to, and the director expected some kind of emotional impact without putting in the real work to get us there.
But here we are with Eisenberg’s follow-up, A Real Pain. And everything that was missing from that first film is here now. Whatever reexamining Eisenberg did over the last two years worked.
He stars in this one alongside Kieran Culkin, with the two playing cousins who grew up together but who’ve become less close recently, primarily because of life. Eisenberg is David, who’s married, has a kid, lives in New York City, and works a lot. Kieran Culkin’s Benji is and does none of these things and lives a few hours away in Binghamton. Their grandmother recently died, so the two have decided to take a trip together to her former home in Poland, to pay respects to where she was born and to absorb her story of surviving the Holocaust by going with a tour group to various Jewish sites in the area.
What we get is a kind of lovely, quite messy, funny, sad, affirming film about a lot of things, including how we regard others’ pain—whether that’s pain on the apocalyptic scale of the Holocaust, or the pain of a complicated person trying to find his way. Benji is many things wrapped up in one package: he’s abrasive but confusingly charming, he’s deeply empathetic but casually callous, he’s irreverent and reverent, depending on the situation. And Culkin plays him masterfully: he’s magnetic even as we’re not sure we’d want to spend real time with him, and his contradictions feel internally consistent. A Real Pain is a real gem, and a huge step up for Eisenberg as a director.
A Real Pain is in theaters.
