What a wonderful title. Okay, maybe it’s not easy to remember. “A Real Pain”, a commonplace phrase, won’t stick in the brain as did “On the Waterfront” or “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians”. But the irony is beautiful. Kieran Culkin, apparently on an unstoppable run to an Oscar, here plays the sort of aggressively gregarious relative who dismisses other people’s inhibitions as mere irrelevancies. Worried about me smuggling a sack of weed through customs? Get over yourself. Listen up while I take over the piano in this restaurant.
He is, in that colloquial sense, a real pain. But the title also works in a less frivolous mode. As Jesse Eisenberg’s light-fingered second directorial effort progresses it becomes clear that Benji Kaplan’s bluster is – as bluster often does – concealing a smarting inner wound.
Our journey to that understanding runs parallel to two Jewish cousins’ trip back to their homeland of Poland. David and Benji work through a classic comedy dynamic: that of the odd couple. Oscar and Felix in the play of that name. Jeremy and Mark in Peep Show. Saffy and Eddie in Absolutely Fabulous. And on and on. One can hardly imagine better casting than Culkin, a professional rogue on screen, as the dissolute Benji, and Eisenberg, fretful in every project, as the neurotic David.
When we first meet them David is nervously phoning his cousin as he makes his way to the airport. Benji is blithely hanging out in the departure area. Later he will cause different sorts of havoc as trains take them towards the home their grandmother left as the Holocaust gathered force.
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Eisenberg resists the temptation to engage with cheap gags about Americans abroad. The boys join a group that comprises mostly older compatriots who, for the most part, behave in civilised fashion as they ponder differently tragic family histories. It’s a touching, funny drama that allows truths to emerge subtly and sometimes ambiguously. Eisenberg can’t quite find the right tone for the eventual visit to a concentration camp – A Real Pain briefly shuts down rather than engaging – but that is forgivable in a film that otherwise processes the unimaginable past with great subtlety. A small film about great matters.
A Real Pain is in cinemas from Friday, January 10th, with previews from Wednesday, January 8th
