Sundance 2024 Film Review: “A Real Pain”

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A REAL PAIN (Searchlight/Disney – TBD):  David (Jesse Eisenberg, who also wrote and directed) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) are cousins born just months apart and raised in close companionship.  Over the years, though, they’ve drifted apart.  Partly it’s because David remained in New York City, where he has a mundane but successful job selling internet ad space, while Benjy now lives upstate in Binghamton.  But more fundamentally the two men couldn’t be more different:  David is an awkward introvert whose social life is confined to his wife and young son, and Benjy is a huge presence who knows no shame, befriends everyone in his path, and hasn’t even the semblance of a filter.  If David didn’t love Benjy so much, he’d walk on glass to avoid him.  Now they’ve reunited for a long-planned trip to Poland in honor of their late grandmother, who survived the concentration camps to reach America, and who left funds in her will to finance this trip.  The stage is set for disaster, but Eisenberg, whose first film as a writer/director When You Finish Saving the World ran aground on its own heavyhandedness, has added delicacy and grace to his repertoire, and A Real Pain expertly balances the affection and annoyance the cousins feel for one another, in the context of the overwhelming history they’re exploring in Poland.  For all Benjy’s life-of-the-party spirit, we come to realize that he’s riven by despair, and David’s reticence masks compassion and strength.  Eisenberg’s fine script (A Real Pain won the Sundance prize for screenwriting) expresses all of this in an unrushed 89 minutes, and also creates solid roles for others in the cousins’ traveling party, including their polite British guide (Will Sharpe) and a Rwandan convert to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan).  As an actor, Eisenberg is very much in his comfort zone as an anxiety-ridden New Yorker, and he graciously gives the film’s performing mantle to Culkin, who expands on his Succession work by making Benjy hilarious, infuriating and sad, often at the same time.  A Real Pain establishes Eisenberg as a real filmmaker.