American Jewish cousins David and Benji embark on a trip to Poland to visit the childhood home of their late grandmother and to connect with their heritage. David, a reserved and pragmatic father and husband, contrasts sharply with Benji, a free-spirited and eccentric drifter. Their personalities clash as Benji criticizes David for losing his former passion and spontaneity, while David struggles with Benji's unfiltered outbursts and lack of direction in life.
The pair have traveled as part of a Nazi GermanHolocaust tour group led by James, a knowledgeable yet detached gentile British tour guide. The cousins' dynamic is tested throughout the trip, from a missed train stop to a confrontation at the Old Jewish Cemetery where Benji critiques the tour's lack of emotional authenticity and challenges its focus on facts and statistics, to David's embarrassment. Benji nonetheless connects with the group members, who find themselves moved by his emotional honesty.
During a group dinner, Benji continues behaving inappropriately and making uncomfortable comments, prompting the tour group to confront him delicately. Benji leaves the table, and David opens up to the group about the complex mixture of admiration, resentment, and envy he feels towards his cousin. He additionally reveals that the two have drifted apart following a suicide attempt by Benji earlier that year.
On their last day of the tour, the group visits the Nazi German Majdanek concentration camp. Before departing from the group, James tells Benji that he is the first person on one of his tours to provide him with feedback, and thanks him for changing his perspective on the way he should lead his tour. David and Benji travel to their grandmother's former home as their final stop, where Benji recounts an incident from years earlier where their grandmother slapped him after he arrived late and intoxicated to dinner with her. He states that the slap gave him a sense of clarity and humility, and laments that she was the only person able to keep him disciplined.
On their final night in Poland, the cousins smoke marijuana on a hotel rooftop together, where Benji confronts David about his changed personality and why he never visits him. While David initially responds that he is busy with his wife and child, he eventually breaks down and explains that following Benji's suicide attempt, he is unable to bear the thought of a person with Benji's passion for life killing themselves.
The pair return to New York, where Benji declines David's offers to visit his home for dinner and to drive Benji to his train home from Penn Station. This prompts David to slap Benji, though they immediately reconcile and profess that they care deeply about each other. David returns to his home and greets his wife and child, while Benji sits alone at the airport, observing other groups of travelers around him.
In August 2022, Screen Daily exclusively announced that Jesse Eisenberg would write, direct, and star in A Real Pain opposite Kieran Culkin. Emma Stone, Dave McCary and Ali Herting were set to produce for Fruit Tree.[8]A Real Pain marks Eisenberg's second feature film as a writer-director and second collaboration with Fruit Tree, following When You Finish Saving the World (2022).[9] It is also Culkin's first major project after the conclusion of the satirical comedy-drama television series Succession (2018–2023).[10]
Other than Home Alone (1990), which he claims to have watched 17 times,[11] Eisenberg was unfamiliar with Culkin's work prior to developing A Real Pain.[12][13] He cast him anyway because his sister thought Culkin was the right person to play Benji,[13] and he had a good intuition about him based on the few conversations they previously had.[12] Culkin, on the other hand, was hesitant to jump into another "intense" project so soon after wrapping Succession.[14] He tried to back out of A Real Pain two weeks before filming began, citing his need to not be away from his family as the main reason,[15][16] but he loved Eisenberg's "beautiful" script and When You Finish Saving the World.[14][15] Stone ultimately guilt tripped him into staying on by telling him that if he were to leave, the entire production would essentially fall apart.[17][16]
Writing
Eisenberg comes from a secular Jewish background and has Polish ancestry.[18][19] For twenty years, he has struggled with answering the question of how he could reconcile his "modern daily challenges" with his Ashkenazi ancestor's historical trauma as Holocaust victims and survivors.[20][21] When he started writing A Real Pain in 2022, which initially began as a thought experiment, Eisenberg sought to place two modern, mismatched cousins struggling with "different degrees of pain," such as anxiety and depression, against the backdrop of the horrors of World War II. The setting allowed him to explore those themes in a "visually explicit" manner and "implicitly" ask questions in a way that did not feel didactic.[20]
Filming
Principal photography took place in New York City and various locations across Poland from May to June 2023.[22][23] Because Eisenberg started writing during the COVID-19 pandemic, he used the street view feature on Google Maps and pictures he took when he traveled to Poland with his wife in 2008 to scout locations and take the tour that the characters were going on.[24] Michał Dymek, the cinematographer, is a native of Warsaw and was raised with historical awareness of the events that occurred in his country.[24] His deep knowledge of his hometown helped Eisenberg film montages that would highlight Poland's beauty:[24]
I wanted the portrayal of Poland in general to feel beautiful and dynamic and colorful and all the things that I feel when I'm there. I feel it's too often depicted as bleak, fetishizing its Eastern EuropeanSoviet communist history and fetishizing the horrors of the war. And that's not the Poland I know at all. The Poland I know is vibrant and colorful and warm. So I wanted to show that side of Poland, which is a side that I hadn't seen a lot in American movies, a side that felt just completely true to me.
Dymek's main artistic idea was to work with perspective, as the film features characters who see themselves differently.[25] He wanted to combine their observations by using standard lenses with longer optics, which flattens the perspective to "play with the fact that sometimes the same image can be defined differently by choosing a different focal lens."[25]
Originally scheduled to be released in the United States on October 18, 2024,[43] the film's release was subsequently pushed by two weeks to November 1.[44]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 191 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "Led by a scene-stealing turn from Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain is a powerfully funny, emotionally resonant dramedy that finds writer-director-star Jesse Eisenberg playing to his strengths on either side of the camera."[47]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 85 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[48]
The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney described A Real Pain as "funny, heartfelt, and moving in equal measure."[2] He praised Eisenberg's "impeccable" judgement and great skill at "balancing sardonic wit with piercing solemnity in a movie full of feeling, in which no emotion is unearned."[2]Owen Gleiberman for Variety welcomed Eisenberg into a "hallowed company" of actors who turned out to be born filmmakers, such as Greta Gerwig, Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper.[1] To Ed Potton of The Sunday Times, the story was "perfectly weighted between bleak and warm, poignant and irreverent."[49] Bill Goodykontz, in a review for The Arizona Republic, thought Eisenberg pulled off a magic trick by making a film with "backdrops of pain and despair, both personal and existential, that is also funny, charming and something approaching uplifting."[50] For IndieWire's annual critics poll, of which 177 critics and journalists from around the world voted, Eisenberg's work placed second on the Best Screenplay list, behind Sean Baker's script for Anora.[51]
Culkin's "career-high" performance was widely acclaimed.[52]Ty Burr for The Washington Post wrote that he "walks a line between obnoxiousness and delight; it’s a performance both liberating and touched by a deeper, more inarticulate sadness."[53]Manohla Dargis, writing for The New York Times, thought Culkin was "shockingly great" and articulated Benji's inner turmoil through a "transparently readable, sometimes viscerally destabilizing" manner.[54]Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle lauded his "dominating", tour de force performance, writing that Eisenberg invented a new film genre called "the Kieran Culkin movie."[55] Film journalists from Collider,[56]The Hollywood Reporter,[57]Rolling Stone,[58]Time,[59] and Vulture declared Culkin's performance as one of the finest of the year.[60]
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