MIDNIGHT REVIEWS A Real Pain Review
A movie that runs rings around the competition.
Matthew D. Smith also has a podcast he co-hosts with Leslie Wai. You can find it here.
A Real Pain (1hr 30mins)
Directed by: Jesse Eisenberg
Featuring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin
Synopsis: Two mismatched cousins, attached at the hip when children, reunite as adults after their grandmother dies. To honour one of her final requests, they go on a tour around parts of Poland.
Review: Jesse Eisenberg is going round in circles.
Having made his name playing slightly retiring, nervously chattering beansprouts, he’s back at it again here but with an edge. His character, David, used to cry at everything but these days finds himself taking pills to manage his OCD and even when silent his anxiety screams at the top of its voice. Benji (Culkin) insists that he has to find the old David, the one who would express himself, insisting that he has to ‘fish that guy out every time’ they reconvene.
Benji, you see, is the complete opposite and yet the same. Culkin plays Benji as someone who doesn’t care what people think, but not as someone who uses that as an excuse to be an asshole. Benji cares, with another difference being that when Benji walks into a room, everyone turns their heads. With David, they just about remember his name. But they both struggle with an inner turmoil, brought about by suffering both personal and of a more informal nature as they tour holocaust memorials.
There’s that circle again.
Throughout A Real Pain, Eisenberg uses a circle as a visual motif, the idea being coming back to where you started. It’s a way of exploring not just the performances he’s crafted before (David is a realistic version of, say, Columbus from Zombieland) but also the notion of attempting to travel back in time to try to make sense of what came before you. Blue stains on the walls of a gas chamber, viewed by a tour group of Jews, drop us into what it might have felt like making that final walk. Even the tour leader, like those who would’ve led Jews to their death, is foreign to them, interested in their religion for reasons other than his actual beliefs. Unlike decades past though, the guide is benign, and on leaving the prison camp some of the group don’t know how to feel.
By the end of the ninety minutes, we’re back where we started and yet changed.
In this way, A Real Pain is extremely moving, but in other sequences it introduces a touching humour alongside the cringe-inducing behaviours our family can sometimes display. It’s all in aid of these characters trying to get over death that is much closer to them. Hearing statistics regarding how many people died (say, 64,000+ people in Gaza killed) hits in a different way to hearing a close family member died. In ways, it’s easier to comprehend a close family member dying, if not easier to face. The idea of tens of thousands, or even hundreds, of people dying is something the human brain can’t deal with, can’t imagine; attempting to fathom it feels like trying to run an entire marathon in a handful of steps.
Eisenberg and Culkin both display the same emotional baggage even if they are handled differently by their characters. Minor twitches let us know when Benji’s about to crack, whilst David simply fills up until things spill out of him. Neither finish dealing with death, because who does?
By the end of the ninety minutes, we’re back where we started and yet changed. A Real Pain trusts us to feel this without having to explain it. After all, an explanation is like hearing a news report from any war-torn or disaster-ridden location. As best as an explanation might try, simply putting events into words creates a distance. Eisenberg realises this and allows imagery, the prime tool of cinema and performance, to allow his story to tell itself without getting in the way. An understated movie that shows even if you’re going round in circles, or maybe because you are, you never really finish.
Matthew D. Smith likes to overshare his views on movies and TV shows whenever and wherever he can. Indulge him, and follow him on Twitter or enjoy the podcast he co-hosts with Leslie Wai.
