{"id":77048,"date":"2026-02-20T09:40:34","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T01:40:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=77048"},"modified":"2026-02-20T09:40:34","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T01:40:34","slug":"a-real-pain-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/?p=77048","title":{"rendered":"A Real Pain (2024)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This is the first time I’ve watched a film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and he even stars here as one of two cousins on a trip to Poland. It’s effectively travelogue which is always nice to watch as you feel like you’re part of the group tour with them, seeing what they see. More importantly, it’s a deep dive into the relationship between the two. It’s quietly understated, restrained in its ambitions and painfully authentic, all excellent reasons for me to love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Benji Kaplan meets his cousin David at the airport in New York from where they are meant to depart on Jewish heritage tour to Poland together. Though once as close as brothers, they have drifted apart. Their grandmother has recently passed away, leaving them some funds to visit the home where she grew up before the Second World War. Benji has a family and a solid career but knows that David is a drifter who has been faring poorly since their grandmother’s death and wants to cheer him up. In Warsaw, they meet the other members of the tour along with James, their British guide. They begin with a visit to the Warsaw Uprising Monument where the more extroverted David quickly convinces the others to join him in taking funny photos while the more reserved Benji stands back. Yet when they are on the train the next day to visit the Majdanek concentration camp, David becomes upset at the incongruity of travelling in a first-class carriage when their forebears were shipped on trains to die. He decides to go to the coach section, disrupting the group, so Benji apologizes for him and feels obliged to accompany his cousin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I have no special feelings for Jewish culture and even feel that subjects like the Holocaust are already overrepresented in Hollywood, this take is both original and earnest enough to win me over. Eisenberg is obviously channeling his own real feelings here about wanting to honor and remember the sacrifices and trauma of his ancestors while living a life full of privilege. It’s a valid and natural question for a third-generation survivor to ask even if David beats himself up too much over it. This film manages the difficult task of striking a balance between not shying away from the scale of the horror while being grateful that their modern lives are so much more comfortable and safe. This is reflected in how the grim imagery of the concentration camp is accompanied by beautiful scenes of Poland, both of its countryside and its cities. It never feels didactic or preachy and the different perspectives of the other members of the tour provide different interpretations of what it means to be Jewish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For my part, I’m more impressed by the film’s depiction of the relationship between the two cousins. It consistently stays within Benji’s headspace such that there is always a part of David that he finds mysterious and incomprehensible. His mixed feelings of love, envy, frustration and worry all come through strongly. To him, there’s something almost magical in his cousin’s ability to enter a room and effortlessly command everyone’s attention. Even when he throws a tantrum, the raw authenticity of his emotions win others over. But we also see how inconsistent and unreliable he is, how he can deliver a heartfelt spiel and forget all about it the next day. It would be easy or tempting to have their shared experience of this heritage tour to result in some kind of breakthrough in their relationship, some way to save David from himself. But that would ring false. Theirs is a dynamic that has developed over the course of decades and a single trip together wouldn’t change anything. Instead, they resolve to keep in touch as everyone always does and life goes on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read that Eisenberg originally meant to play the David role himself and had to be talked out of it by the producers. We can certainly see how the Benji character is more similar to his usual roles as a socially awkward and reserved person. I’m not confident that he would have done better than Kieran Culkin here but it speaks well of his willingness to experiment beyond his usual niche. In any case, I consider this to be a very strong film that achieves exactly what it set out to do and contextualizes some of the angst of Jewish=Americans in a way that everyone can appreciate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the first time I’ve watched a film written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg and he even stars here as one of two cousins on a trip to Poland. It’s effectively travelogue which is always nice to watch as you feel like you’re part of the group tour with them, seeing what they see. … Continue reading A Real Pain (2024)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=77048"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77154,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77048\/revisions\/77154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=77048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=77048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calltoreason.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=77048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}