A Real Pain (2024)

The critics agree that A Real Pain is a great film, with a high-energy, tortured central performance which led to Mick LaSalle of the San Franciso Chronicle declaring that a new genre had been invented – “the Kieran Culkin movie”. Honestly, it is a brilliant performance. The high-energy twitching of neurosis captured in every move.

I too loved this slightly off-beat, neatly written exploration of grief and pain across generations. It does something quite remarkable in providing a contemporary take on the meaning of pain amidst a history of the Holocaust. It is described as a comedy-drama. And it is excellent at shifting the tone imperceptibly from quirky character laughs to the deep seriousness of a terrifying history of man’s brutality.

A Real Pain can be described as a buddy comedy-drama about two Jewish-American cousins (Jesse Eisenberg as David and Kieran Culkin as Benji) who travel to Poland to honour their late Grandma. It starts and ends in the airport. And in between times we find out about the pain both cousins carry and how it manifests in their relationships between each other and with the rest of the tourists. The cousin’s dynamic is tested throughout the trip. The audience is also tested throughout the movie, keeping up with the moods of Benji:

Benji Kaplan: Dave, we're on a fuckin Holocaust tour. If now isn't the time and place to grieve, to open up, then I don't know what to tell you, man.

I recently listened to a podcast interview between film critic Mark Kermode and comedian/actor/writer/producer Brett Goldstein where Goldstein says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Serious drama without humour is bad art.” And A Real Pain shows that comedy is a serious business.

I know that if I try to write about comedy it can become humourless It should not be over-analysed. So, it is not the jokes that I’m going to dissect but the courage of the writer and performers to deliver the full elasticity of the spectrum of drama. To consider how that shift in tone was accomplished.

The humour is established early. The anxiety of David versus the anarchic free-spirit of Benji provides a contrast of approaches to the world. Comedy is often borne out of complexity and confusion, and there is a delight in seeing the struggle between these two opposite forces. But we also know that they don’t just struggle with each other, they struggle with the world. David takes anti-depressants and Benji takes weed.

The writing draws these characters as opposite, but also drips with concern for them and the gape between them. It allows us to be accepting of them, whether we fall for their charm or not. It shows pain, real pain, but also the mainstay of much contemporary humour, the embarrassment and cringe of social awkwardness. The cinema audience chuckle.

And A Real Pain uses cinema to take us between the stages of comedy and drama – whether that be through a simple Chopin piano soundtrack, montages of Poland from the Soviet Style of Warsaw to the charm of the preserved Old Town of Lublin, or the lingering shots of train tracks from town to concentration camp. A shot of shoes piled up in a crate causes an intake of breath. The audience fall silent.

It achieves this because the characters are so well drawn. Their pain is real. Grief is real. Passions are real. And so is hope.

It remains a comedy, because it stay with the themes of acceptance and love. It holds an optimism. But doesn’t shy away from how two close relatives can have parallel, but different pasts and pain. The cousins part still unsure of each other, still aching for a solution, but with the knowledge that they care deeply for each other.

Two deeply unbalanced characters provide the balance between heartbreak and comedy.

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